Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Sayen: Desert Road’ on Prime Video, a Gritty Action Sequel

Sayen: Desert Road is the sequel to Sayen, a Prime Video original action movie about an indigenous woman in Chile seeking revenge for the murder of her grandmother; in the second installment, Sayen takes on the corporate overlords who upended her life.

SAYEN: DESERT ROAD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Since she fought back against a nefarious mining company that caused the murder of her grandmother in the previous film, title heroine Sayen (Rallen Montenegro), of the Mapuche natives, has been forced to go on the run, branded a dangerous eco-terrorist by the media. But she’s still intent on bringing this criminal corporation to justice. Her mission takes her from the forest setting of the first film to Chile’s Atacama Desert in the sequel, where she teams with Quimal (Katalina Sánchez), who may have the literal receipts needed to implicate the mining company and their looting of Chile’s natural resources. Fights, chases, and bad guys having meetings about how to get rid of this Mapuche girl all ensue. Just don’t look for much ultimate resolution, as this is the second part of a pre-paid trilogy.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Both Sayen movies have elements of one-person-army vengeance thrillers that often star the likes of Liam Neeson or Jason Statham, and director Alexander Witt made the second Resident Evil movie; it’s easy enough to picture Milla Jovovich in a similar story, though these lean more later-period, low-rent Gina Carano than B-movie queen Jovovich. There’s also a touch of Jack Reacher in Sayen’s minimalist resourcefulness.

Performance Worth Watching: Rallen Montenegro has the right grit and gravity for this type of material, even if this particular version doesn’t give her much to do.

Memorable Dialogue: The screenplay consists largely of forgettable boilerplate, but, as with the first movie, it’s interesting to hear substantial chunks of dialogue spoken in Mapudungun, the Mapuche language.

Sex and Skin: None, unless occasional bare midriffs count. These characters are all action and no, uh, action.

Our Take: Just as Sayen has a nice, clean, satisfying set-up for an old-fashioned action movie – native woman uses her survival skills to vengefully fight back against the goons who outnumber and outarm her – Sayen: Desert Road has an equally durable sequel premise: now-radicalized fugitive Sayen goes on the lam and undertakes a mission to expose and destroy Actaeon, an evil corporation poisoning the people and environment of Chile. The two movies also share a major strength: Location shooting that actually allows the natural splendor of those environments to shine through, rather than simulating them with green-screen and bad compositing, like so many bigger-budget productions do. This goes a long way toward making Sayen: Desert Road look like a real movie, especially in an early sequence where the powder blue of the desert skies combines pleasingly with the bright yellow machinery of an Actaeon facility. Later, a car chase through the desert actually looks like real cars driving through the real desert – imagine that!

Unfortunately, the locations’ realness is the end of the simple pleasures the movie promises. The first Sayen ultimately wasn’t much of an action picture, with clumsy choreography and a curious lack of sustained tension. Whether by design or inability to change course on a trilogy that was presumably made concurrently or very close together, Desert Road doesn’t try to step up its game much. Early on, it looks as if director Alexander Witt (Resident Evil: Apocalypse) may be introducing a bit more kinetic energy to Sayen’s moves, which were understandably more defensive for much of the first film. But he simply doesn’t assemble many especially convincing moments of physical conflict for star Rallen Montenegro; the punches looked pulled, no one moves especially quickly, the henchmen often look as if they’re waiting around for the heroes to knock guns out of their hands, and the editing fudges the would-be stunts without much subtlety. Time after time, the movie pauses to show off Sayen’s physical prowess, only to wind up shining its spotlight on uninspired fisticuffs that barely seem to connect. It’s a worst-of-both-worlds approach: The action isn’t heightened or balletic in the manner of Johns Wick or Woo, but it also isn’t nasty or gritty enough to register as truly realistic, either. And without strong action, there simply isn’t much here beyond Montenegro’s taciturn charisma. Even a big cliffhanger ending designed to send us into the third movie lands with a muted splat, rather than the ratcheting up that it’s aiming for.

Our Call: The idea of a native woman fighting for environmental justice in Chile by beating the holy hell out of various corporate goons is so cool, which makes it all the more disappointing to report that even full-tilt action fans should probably SKIP IT.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.