With the Criterion Collection releasing a new 4K UHD Blu-ray of Point Blank, now feels like the perfect time to revisit the influence of the film on modern cinema.

John Boorman’s seminal revenge thriller, adapted from Donald Westlake’s novel The Hunter, follows the implacable Walker (Lee Marvin) as he hunts down the men who betrayed him and reclaim the money he’s owed. Boorman transforms a straightforward revenge story into an abstract existential fever dream made up of fractured editing, sparse dialogue and a protagonist who seems to drift through Los Angeles like a ghost.

The film’s influence stretches far beyond the revenge genre itself. Directors from Steven Soderbergh and Walter Hill to Edgar Wright and Nicolas Winding Refn have borrowed from its elliptical editing, sparse dialogue, almost supernaturally gifted protagonists and coolly detached violence.

There are countless crime films that owe a debt to Point Blank without technically being revenge thrillers at all – The Driver, Thief and Sexy Beast among them – but for the sake of focus, I’ve limited it to 10 of the best revenge thrillers that owe something to Boorman’s iconic film…

10. Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai

Of course I’m immediately undermining my rule, kicking off with a film that barely qualifies as a revenge thriller at all! Ghost Dog is perhaps an unconventional choice, given that revenge is only part of the story, but Jim Jarmusch’s love of Lee Marvin is well documented, and his meditative hitman film shares Point Blank’s sparse, existential atmosphere.

Forest Whitaker plays a philosophical, samurai-modelled assassin, who takes retribution on the Mafia bosses who tried to kill him for a job gone wrong. Like Marvin, Whitaker gives an impassive, minimalist performance, calmly moving through a decaying criminal underworld. While Marvin is a cold, distant figure though, there is something ineffably humane and melancholy about Whitaker’s character, making him a much more tragic figure than you might expect. The ageing mobsters surrounding him are so hopelessly out of touch they verge on comic relief, giving the film the same strange balance of seriousness and absurdity Boorman found in Walker’s war against the faceless “organisation”.

9. In Order Of Disappearance

Hans Petter Moland’s icy revenge thriller initially seems worlds away from Point Blank: snowy Norwegian landscapes instead of brutalist Los Angeles, deadpan Nordic humour instead of existential cool. Yet as the plot unfolds, the more obvious the connection becomes. Stellan Skarsgård plays a snowplough driver who embarks on a methodical mission of vengeance after his son’s death, moving up the criminal hierarchy with brutal efficiency.

Like Marvin, Skarsgård makes for an unconventional protagonist, with his craggy, exhausted appearance, but he gives such a charismatic, nuanced performance, alternately funny and tragic, that it all works. As the violence escalates, the film becomes increasingly existential and darkly comic, each revenge killing simply generating another. At one point, the characters even acknowledge the absurdity of the situation, sharing a laugh before getting on with the business of killing each other. Beneath the Coen Brothers-style absurdity lies the same bleak idea driving Point Blank: revenge doesn’t heal trauma – it just gives traumatised people something to do.

8. Drive

Nicolas Winding Refn’s cool-as-anything Drive finds inspiration from the taciturn protagonists of Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai and Walter Hill’s The Driver, but Ryan Gosling’s emotionally detached getaway driver owes just as much to Walker as any of these.

The unnamed driver moves through Los Angeles like a ghost, rarely speaking but frequently erupting into sudden bursts of shocking violence. The fragmented storytelling, minimalist dialogue, dreamlike atmosphere and abrupt scene transitions all recall Boorman’s film, albeit drenched in a retro-modern aesthetic, with a synthy score and neon visuals. Where Point Blank is cold and existential, however, Drive overlays that same emotional detachment with an aching, almost childlike romanticism, and a sense of yearning. There’s a veneer of cool, but below the surface is a lonely fantasy about connection and escape.

7. You Were Never Really Here

Lynne Ramsay’s sparse, stripped-back directing style feels strangely similar to Boorman’s aesthetic, even if their filmographies are wildly different. You Were Never Really Here feels spiritually close to Point Blank, even if it operates on a very different emotional register.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe, a profoundly traumatised fixer rescuing abused and trafficked girls while barely holding himself together psychologically. When one of his missions goes wrong, he finds himself embroiled in a huge conspiracy, which forces him to examine his own past and childhood trauma.

The plot itself is much more emotionally disturbing than Boorman’s cold clinical film, and Joe himself is a much more emotional character than Walker, who is a closed book throughout. Despite this though, Ramsey adopts a similarly fluid visual language, turning revenge into something fragmented, traumatic and dreamlike, using non-linear editing and flashbacks to tell the story with limited exposition. Like Walker, Joe seems to apparate and vanish without warning, giving him a strangely ethereal aura, and creating the same disorienting sense that we’re trapped inside the protagonist’s damaged consciousness.

6. Dead Man’s Shoes

Shane Meadows‘ bleak British revenge drama isn’t a natural descendant of Boorman’s film. It’s less stylised, and a lot more grounded in reality, relocating the revenge plot to a grim Midlands housing estate. Like Point Blank though, the film questions whether revenge can ever really provide closure, and examines the toll it takes on the protagonist himself.

Paddy Considine gives a powerhouse performance, bringing the same relentless determination and barely suppressed rage as Lee Marvin. He plays an almost mythic avenger, taking on an entire mob in revenge for the mistreatment of his brother. Meadows gradually reveals that the protagonist’s campaign is driven as much by guilt and self-loathing as by anger, giving the film the same haunted quality that hangs over Walker throughout Point Blank.

There’s also an ambiguity surrounding the protagonist’s relationship to reality itself, which feels directly linked to Point Blank. Meadows combines social realism with near-unbearable levels of tension, crafting a revenge film that feels deeply human while still carrying the dreadful inevitability of Boorman’s classic.

5. Blue Ruin

What makes Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin such an interesting companion piece to Point Blank is the way it so completely dismantles the fantasy of the revenge protagonist. It’s one of my favourite revenge thrillers primarily because the hero so clearly doesn’t want to be in a revenge thriller!

Macon Blair plays Dwght a traumatised drifter who sets out to avenge his parents’ deaths despite being catastrophically unprepared for violence. Unlike Marvin’s slick, mythic avenger, Dwight is hapless, panicky, and visibly terrified throughout. Where Walker seemingly materialises wherever he needs to be, Blue Ruin examines all the admin that must go along with pursuing a revenge mission. Trying to tend your own injuries for example, is something that we’ve seen countless stoic heroes do in more conventional films to stay off grid, but here, (after shooting himself with a crossbow) Dwight is woefully ill-prepared, only giving his injury a cursory attempt before passing out and going to the hospital. The whole film is peppered with darkly comic moments where the practicalities of revenge puncture the whole mythology of the genre.

Yet structurally the film still resembles Point Blank: the deeper Blair’s character descends into revenge, the more detached it becomes from justice or catharsis, until the original motive for revenge barely matters anymore. Saulnier deliberately strips the film of any sense of coolness or romanticism, turning revenge into something that is by turns dryly comic and deeply sad.

4. Rolling Thunder

A favourite of Quentin Tarantino, this post-Vietnam revenge thriller is more nihilistic and overtly violent than Point Blank, but Paul Schrader’s fatalistic script channels the same sense of emotional numbness and post-traumatic alienation that defines Walker.

William Devane plays a traumatised Vietnam veteran who returns home psychologically hollowed out before embarking on a path of revenge after a horrifying act of violence that leaves him minus a hand. The interesting thing about Rolling Thunder is just how detached from ordinary life Devane is, even before the film’s central act of violence pushes him toward revenge. When he begins taking revenge, you almost get the sense that he is relieved, back in an environment he understands.

Devane’s performance mirrors Marvin’s in fascinating ways too: both men remain emotionally unreadable for most of the runtime, making the occasional flickers of pain or humanity feel all the more unsettling, building toward one of the grimmest revenge climaxes of the 1970s.

3. Memento

Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough thriller owes an obvious debt to Point Blank’s fractured chronology and existential antihero. Guy Pearce plays Leonard, an amnesiac trying to hunt down his wife’s killer while suffering from severe short-term memory loss. In a neat narrative trick, Nolan structures the entire film in reverse, gradually revealing the truth by peeling back layers of memory and self-deception. It’s the cinematic equivalent of that Kierkegaard quote “Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.”

Beyond the formal experimentation, though, Leonard shares Walker’s compulsive, almost mechanical pursuit of revenge – at a certain point, they are simply going through the motions. Like Walker’s mantra of “I really want the money,” we don’t fully buy Leonard’s justification at the end; both men feel trapped inside narratives they can no longer escape, driven forward less by purpose than by existential inertia.

2. Get Carter

I don’t think Get Carter really gets its due as one of the best British films of all time. I think a lot of people dismiss it as an exploitative, quite nasty gangster film, when actually there’s a lot more going on. It’s part western, part noir, and grounded in the decaying urban realism of 1970s Britain. Mike Hodges‘ editing owes a huge debt to the elliptical storytelling of Point Blank, making use of jump cuts and non-linear editing to expedite the story.

As the cold-blooded, vengeful Carter, Michael Caine is just as steely and methodical as Lee Marvin, ruthlessly murdering his way through Newcastle’s criminal underworld to get to the bottom of his brother’s death. Caine is almost reptilian in his callous disregard for anyone who gets in his way, aside from that one scene where he breaks down, in one of the most powerful displays of emotion of Caine’s long career.

The result is a revenge thriller stripped down to something cold, procedural and deeply cynical. It feels like a uniquely British response to Boorman’s existential neo-noir – it’s bleak, with no catharsis, and Caine’s performance remains one of the defining antiheroes of British cinema.

1. The Limey

Okay maybe this is a controversial pick for number one, given how even I don’t believe this is the best film on this list, but Steven Soderbergh’s film is probably the most explicit modern descendant of Point Blank. The story of an ageing British gangster (Terence Stamp) moving through an abstract, depersonalised Los Angeles, trying to track down the people responsible for his daughter’s death. Soderbergh plays with non-linear editing; scenes overlap in time, and memories bleed into the present, putting us clearly in the mindset of the protagonist. Take the introduction of Peter Fonda’s villain, where Soderbergh essentially edits a mini music video for The Hollies‘ “King Midas In Reverse“, taking scenes from much later in the film to introduce the character succinctly and elegantly.

Soderbergh openly lifted editing rhythms and stylistic ideas from Point Blank, even admitting as much to Boorman himself on the Criterion commentary track. The fractured editing, temporal dislocation and ghostly atmosphere are direct homages to Boorman’s film, as is the ultimate emptiness that suffuses the film when Stamp finally gets what he wants. It’s just as potent an examination on the futility of revenge as Point Blank, but it also carries a mournful sadness about ageing, regret and masculinity that feels uniquely its own.