10 Movies That BRILLIANTLY Avoided Huge Cliches

Jeremy Saulnier's taut thriller Blue Ruin is basically a feature-length exercise in taking the revenge movie formula and turning it brilliantly inside out.

The film follows Dwight (Macon Blair), a man who embarks on a quest to kill the man who apparently murdered his parents two decades earlier, but there's absolutely nothing badass about Dwight's violent crusade.

Blue Ruin considers what it'd be like if a regular person with limited weapons experience wanted to extract a pound of flesh, a fact best embodied by a mid-film scene where Dwight ends up shot in the leg with a crossbow, forcing him to perform self-surgery.

Except, rather than the hero tidily patching himself up as expected, Dwight's attempt to remove the crossbow from his leg only makes matters worse, causing blood to gush from the wound, prompting him to groggily go to hospital and let the professionals do the job instead.

If there's a lot of love for "competence porn" movies, which focus on a character who is extremely skilled at something going about it, Blue Ruin is basically the opposite - a savage paean to how utterly ill-equipped the average person is to wreak vengeance of any kind.