You judge Scott Adkins movies on a curve. There’s no point worrying about plot or dialogue or even acting, at least not the showy awards-baiting version of it that people are used to. Adkins plays the same character in basically every movie – as he does here in Diablo (2025) – but to say he’s not acting wouldn’t be fair. Watch this guy kick a nameless henchman through a window, and you can see the appeal. It’s acting as sheer kinetic energy. And he’s one of the very best at it.
To get the best out of a Scott Adkins movie, you need a director who understands him. His best collaborative partner seems to be Jesse V. Johnson, with whom he made Accident Man and the brilliant Avengement, although they also teamed up for Debt Collectors, which wasn’t great, so the whole thing is hardly an exact science. Ernesto Díaz Espinoza is behind Diablo, and he seems to really get Adkins, too. His movie supplies a steady stream of goons for him to punch and wide-angle shots so we can see him do it, but surprisingly, the best thing about the feature isn’t Adkins or Espinoza, but someone else entirely.
Plot-wise, things are as simplistic as ever. Adkins plays Kris, an annoyed ex-con – a not-unfamiliar role for him – who kidnaps Elisa (Alanna De La Rossa), the daughter of dangerous, sadistic mob boss Vicente (Lucho Velasco), for initially mysterious reasons. Naturally, Vicente mobilises an army of goons to get his daughter back while Kris’s motivations are gradually explained, which would have been enough of an excuse for an Adkins vehicle on its own. But Diablo introduces a surprisingly chaotic third element – El Corvo (Marko Zaror), a psychopathic hitman who has his own reasons for wanting to get his hands on Elisa and punish Vicente.
If there’s a single reason to watch this movie, it’s El Corvo. He’s one of the better screen nutcases since No Country For Old Men’s Anton Chirgurh. Not to compare the raw quality of the performances, of course, but in their essential vibe, they’re pretty similar; when El Corvo shows up on screen, you know some nasty stuff’s about to go down, and Zaror, a hulking Chilean martial artist with a very similar appeal to Adkins in terms of his kick-ass feasibility, delights in playing the character as an exaggerated Bondian supervillain with a Mega Man hand and a generally slimy demeanour.
Don’t get me wrong, Adkins is great too, and his fight scenes with El Corvo are great precisely because the two men are competent real-life martial artists operating at the top of their respective physical games. But he’s mostly playing a very angry Adkins archetype. There are some efforts to inject more emotional nuance into the character than usual through his relationship with Elisa, which has some ups and downs, but if we’re being frank, we’re here for him to smack people around. And he does.
Crucially, Diablo is engineered to accommodate this almost exclusively. The plot consistently supplies an excuse for fisticuffs, and then prioritises clarity above any other consideration, since it knows precisely what people are looking for. There’s an element of daftness to some of the beats and character moments, but it doesn’t matter a great deal since the shape of the overall story is deliberately simplistic. You want the bad guy dead, and you know Kris is the man to do it, so everything revolves around a basic face-punching setup and payoff.
What more would you want? Well, in truth, probably quite a bit, but in terms of what else you’d want from this kind of low-budget indie actioner with this cast, the answer is likely very little. This isn’t up there with the very finest Adkins vehicles, but it’s close enough to not feel like you’ve wasted your time. I, at least, was happy with that. But I’m a simple man.