HEADHUNTER

Soldier of fortune Steve Flynn continues his one-man, no-holds-barred campaign against the forces of evil that just won’t leave him in peace.

The bad news is that Flynn’s lover, Spanish cop Maria Santiago, who along with Flynn and half a dozen others was marked for death (Ambush, 2016), has been beheaded and her last moments captured on video. The good news is that hit man Brian Tasker, who’d planned to play the video for Flynn as a prelude to killing him, is dead himself at Flynn’s capable hands. Where does that leave things? Tasker’s client, aging Albanian crime lord Viktor Bashkim, is still at large, still plotting Flynn’s demise and a host of lesser felonies, beginning with the summary execution of his untrustworthy partner, French gangster Michel Barkin. Superintendent Rik Dean, whom Flynn had to knock out to kill Tasker while he was in police custody, is determined to see Flynn tried for homicide. Molly Cartwright, the beautiful police officer who rings down the curtain on Flynn’s act of revenge by tasering and cuffing him, keeps trying to kiss off DS Alan Hardiker, the lover who cheated on her with another cop, and he keeps raising the stakes, eventually setting both Molly and Flynn up for a deadly ambush by Bashkim’s associates. And Bashkim, who’s lost most of his blood relatives and one of his favorite assassins to the unending wars required to maintain his position on top of the heap, hires married sociopaths Matthew Ainsworth and Lizzie Barnes, who, as “Mr. and Mrs. Jackson,” have developed a nice line in serial homicide themselves.

Fans of body bags would find this bloodbath perfection if only Oldham didn’t keep crosscutting among characters faster than a music video en route to this tranquilly satisfying reflection: “Usually revenge was a dull sensation, but this wasn’t. It was good.”