Son of the Soil wastes little time announcing itself: loud, bloody, pulpy and entirely unembarrassed by its own excesses. This Lagos-set revenge thriller from director Chee Keong Cheung has momentum, muscle and a satisfyingly blunt sense of purpose, embracing its old-school action instincts with gusto.

Razaaq Adoti, who also wrote the script, stars as Zion, a former special forces soldier living in the US after a dishonourable discharge and a prison sentence. His past catches up with him when he receives a desperate message from his sister Ronke (Sharon Rotimi), a hotel chambermaid in Lagos. She has witnessed respectable doctor and secret drug kingpin Dr Baptiste (Philip Asaya) murdering a sex worker, and by the time Zion makes it home, Ronke has been killed and framed as another casualty of Matrix, the fentanyl cocktail poisoning the city’s streets.

From there, the film settles into familiar but sturdy territory. Zion starts hunting for answers, which mostly means barging into places where every survival instinct should tell him not to go. He is not the smoothest avenging angel, and his tactical awareness comes and goes according to the needs of the plot, but Adoti gives him enough wounded force to carry the film through its more improbable turns. There is something oddly endearing about how often Zion’s plan appears to be simply getting battered until the next clue falls out.

The Lagos underworld is rendered as a feverish sprawl of corruption, addiction and gang violence, given extra bite once Damilola Ogunsi enters the picture as albino ganglord Jagunlabi. The film’s brutality has a grubby inventiveness to it, with immolations, bludgeonings and machete attacks delivered with relish. Cheung shoots it all in a colourful handheld rush that gives the action a welcome sense of chaos, even if the fondness for tilted camera angles becomes hard to ignore.

Polish is not really the point here. Son of the Soil is messy, overripe and occasionally over the top, but it is also pacey and enjoyably full-blooded. Its hero may spend half the film making questionable decisions, but the film itself knows exactly what it is doing: delivering a lean, nasty revenge picture with enough swagger to carry it through the bumps.

Son of the Soil is out on Digital now from Trinity Content Partners