The premise of My Name Is Vendetta fits in a single line. Old enemies kill the family of Santo, a former mafia enforcer, and he flees to Milan with his daughter Sofia to hide and plot his revenge. Cosimo Gomez directs this Italian crime thriller, released in 2022 as Il mio nome è vendetta, and he skips the preamble. The story starts moving at once. For the most part it keeps moving, and whether it earns your attention depends on the pairing at its centre: a father with a buried past and a daughter who has only just learned that he had one.

Alessandro Gassmann plays Santo as a tired man who has already paid for his old life and is now asked to pay for it again. The menace is there, but the first thing you notice is fatigue. Gassmann moves through scenes slowly and says little, and the silences do more work than a speech would. The role asks him to be protective and frightening at the same time, which is a difficult balance to hold over a running time spent mostly on the run, and he holds it without tipping into parody. A lesser actor would have leaned on the ex-gangster scowl. Gassmann gives you a man who seems embarrassed by what he knows how to do.

Ginevra Francesconi has the harder assignment. Sofia begins as a quiet teenager whose days are split between hockey games and off-road driving lessons, and the script then needs her to stand beside a man whose past is violent. The Decider review reads the film as a coming-of-age story for Sofia, with the newcomer Francesconi playing her in an intriguing way, and that reading seems right to me. Francesconi never plays her as a bystander. She watches, she absorbs, and the change in her is easier to believe because it is not hurried. Much of the interest lies in how little each of them turns out to know about the other.

That gap is where the film is most alive. Sofia discovers that the truth was kept from her, and that her father once belonged to the ‘Ndrangheta. The revenge plot starts to bend toward something closer to a story about a daughter deciding what she thinks of the man who raised her. It is a good idea, and it does not always sit comfortably with the rest. A gritty, bloody crime picture and a portrait of a child meeting her father for the first time call for different tones. Gomez shifts between them, and the seams show. Some moments of grief and doubt land with real force. Others feel like stops on the way to the next burst of violence.

The violence is blunt. One IMDb viewer calls the film violent, brutal and bloody, and warns the squeamish to stay away; the warning is fair. The action runs on urgency more than invention, and the pace rarely drops. That has its virtues. The film is lean, it does not drag, and it never pretends to be cleverer than it is. Another IMDb user dismisses it as a revenge story seen ten million times before. I cannot fully argue with that. The structure is familiar, the beats arrive on schedule, and you will probably guess where things are heading well before the end. A Rotten Tomatoes reviewer, though, praises exactly what the first one overlooks: it is not long and drawn out, and it is not boring.

The supporting cast is uneven. Remo Girone, as Angelo Lo Bianco, and Alessio Praticò, as Michele Lo Bianco, give the enemy camp enough presence to make the mafia world around Santo credible. Others have less to work with. Ferrario, played by Gabriele Falsetta, and Marino Gallo, played by Mauro Lamanna, mostly exist to move the plot along. The same goes for Vituzzo, played by Marcello Mazzarella, and Rudi Crisarà, played by Francesco Villano. A tighter script would have cut some of these men or handed each of them a scene of their own. As it stands, the villains are named more often than they are felt, and the confrontations lose some of their bite.

Milan is the refuge, and it shifts the second half away from the family’s home and gives it a different feel. I wanted more from it. The city is a place to hide, rarely a presence the characters have to reckon with, and a story about people in flight could have used more of that pressure. The score, by Giorgio Giampà and Marta Lucchesini, sits beneath the action without demanding attention. That suits a story this direct, even if it leaves little to hum afterwards.

In 2023 the producer Iginio Straffi said he was working on a sequel, which seems reasonable. The father and daughter at the centre have more life in them than the machinery of vengeance does, and a second film could do worse than spend its time with them.

As a thriller it is violent, quick and easy to follow, travelling a well-worn road. Nobody will change their mind about the genre because of it. Still, the two leads hold the interest to the end, and for an evening of straightforward Italian crime that is enough. Surprises are thin on the ground, and the performances are what you will remember.