For fans of a certain kind of action movie, Diablo is one of the most anticipated releases of 2025. It marks the sixth collaboration between star Marko Zaror and director Ernesto Díaz Espinoza, and the fifth meeting of Zaror and DTV legend Scott Adkins (this is Adkins’ sixth film to be released in the last 18 months, and he has another six more in various stages of post-production — he remains the hardest-working man in the DTV game). Everyone here is operating at peak levels, delivering a rousing, super propulsive fight-fest with nary an ounce of fat on it. This thing is lean, applying the minimal amount of plot and characterization necessary to move these guys from one lovingly choreographed fight to the next.
Here, Zaror plays an assassin named El Corvo, a disturbed man with a removable metal hand that reveals a hefty blade and a pronounced bald spot that gives him an odd, even comedic look. But looks can be deceiving; El Corvo is introduced via a distressingly harsh sequence in which he terrorizes a waitress over a piece of cake, then stalks and murders her for sport. He’s a sort of Anton Chigurh type, a malevolent force of nature who pursues his victims with a single-minded, Terminator-esque determination. We then meet Kris (Adkins), who has infiltrated the underworld in Bogota, Colombia, and is in the middle of kidnapping a drug lord’s daughter. She’s Elisa (Alana De La Rossa), and much of the film’s first act details this mismatched pair on the run, with Elisa trying to escape Kris, and Kris fighting off a series of miscellaneous adversaries who stand in his way. Elisa’s father is Vincente (Lucho Velasco), and he wants his daughter back so much that he has put a huge bounty on Kris’ head, putting El Corvo on a collision course with Kris and Elisa. To complicate matters, Kris has a secret regarding his actual relationship to Elisa, as well as a shared history with Elisa’s birth mother and Vincente. We won’t spoil the twists and turns of the plot here, although it’s not difficult to figure out, and besides, we’re not here for the story. We’re here for some full-stop ass-kicking, and in this endeavor, Diablo has brought the goods.
Zaror and Espinoza’s previous films together have always emphasized the performer’s tall, broad, but decidedly lean physique; he’s a hulking presence, but also capable of quick, graceful movement. And Zaror and Adkins work very well together; their climactic battle royale in 2010’s Undisputed III: Redemption remains a high-water mark in the history of DTV action. In Diablo, both men get a few fights to themselves before a brief showdown at the halfway mark, then come together again for a prolonged sequence during the film’s climax. There are plenty of moments here for Adkins to show off his brawn, hurling goons around rooms and knocking guys through windows. One of the film’s best scenes finds Elisa in the hands of some gangsters who have wrestled her away from Kris. They plan on returning her to her father, but El Corvo wants the bounty for himself, and so proceeds to infiltrate a bar/brothel and decimate every man and woman he finds inside. It’s a remarkable bit of sustained mayhem, with Zaror dispatching wave after wave of foot soldiers in increasingly gruesome ways. Kris arrives at the end of the massacre and has his first skirmish with El Corvo, and, as is par for the course, gets quickly defeated (one of the great pleasures of the genre is seeing cliches trotted out and rejuvenated through sheer sincerity). Kris didn’t know what he was up against, but now that he’s had a taste, he becomes determined to find El Corvo’s weakness.
From here, the film quickly moves toward its climax, which finds Elisa captured by El Corvo and held hostage at an abandoned factory. Kris and Vincente must submit to El Corvo’s humiliations, and all of these characters’ various shared histories are finally revealed. There’s an alarmingly brutal bit of business where Elisa is tied up to a huge conveyor belt, which is slowly but surely dragging her toward an immense set of threshers. While Vincente tries to figure out how to free her without cutting off her hands, Kris and El Corvo embark on their final duel, and it’s an absolute doozy. Zaror is credited with the fight choreography for Diablo, as he is for most of his films with Espinoza, which makes cinematographer Niccolo De La Fere the wildcard here, being as it is his first time working with Zaror and Espinoza (although he has lensed other projects starring Adkins). Thankfully, his work, everyone’s work, is most notable in Diablo for its clarity and simplicity. Like most DTV films, there’s no time or money available for superfluous bells and whistles. The work is all up there on the screen, maximum effort with minimal resources. For fans of crisp, clean, violent hand-to-hand combat, we wouldn’t have it any other way. No offense to Mission: Impossible or Ballerina or whatever other bajillion-dollar project Hollywood wants to pump out, but Diablo has already claimed the title of action film of the year. This is the pure, uncut stuff.
DIRECTOR: Ernesto Díaz Espinoza; CAST: Scott Adkins, Marko Zaror, Diana Hoyos, Lucho Velasco; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; IN THEATERS/STREAMING: June 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 40 min.
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