I have mentioned the movie "Furious 7". It is one of the highest-grossing films worldwide which is why I keep bringing it up (http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/04/...film-worldwide). It has a vengeance theme. The bad guy is vengeful. The others show how to defend oneself without invoking revenge. The popularity of this movie implies that people generally perceive that vengeance is inappropriate and leads to unhappiness.
Another famous movie, "Munich" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408306/), takes the vengeance theme deeper. In this movie the message is that one is defiled by succeeding at revenge. For me, the most memorable part of that movie was the way the female assassin caressed her cat goodbye after being fatally wounded by the "good" guys.
What these two movies show is that succeeding at vengeance is problematic. Vengeance defines the bad guy and defiles the good guy. I don't see this as a path to happiness.
Vengeance comes with other emotions tagging along in particular fear and negativity that stay in a person's mind because they cannot get satisfaction from revenge even when the bad guys have been executed or the cheating spouse has been abandoned. What some people want is no longer revenge (they have got their revenge), but freedom from vengeance, fear, defilement and negativity which the revenge has not cured but only heightened.



