Headshot (2016)

Headshot (2016)

Starring: Iko Uwais, Chelsea Islan, Sunny Pang, Very Tri Yulisman, Julie Estelle, Ario Bayu, Yayu A.W. Unru, Ganindra Bimo
Director: Kimo Stamboel, Timo Tjahjanto
Action Director: Iko Uwais, Uwais Stunt Team

Headshot is Iko Uwais’s sixth film, coming on the heels of his brief appearances in the Hollywood blockbuster Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens and the Chinese-American co-production Man of Tai Chi. This movie places him once more at the center of the action, albeit without Welsh director Gareth Evans in the director’s chair. This time, we have horror directors Kimo Stamboel (Killers and Macabre) and Timo Tjahjanto (ABCs of Death and V/H/S 2) helming the production, which was partially financed by Japanese studio Nikkatsu. Given the directors’ background and the fact that Nikkatsu also owned Sushi Typhoon, which gave us lots of ultraviolent made-for-ohtaku movies, it’s no surprise that Headshot is unrelentingly gory. So much so, in fact, that it often threatens to stop being fun and simply mean spirited instead.

The movie begins with a violent jailbreak in which a man in a high-security cell (Sunny Pang, of The Night Comes for Us and Kill-Fist) is broken out when the prisoner-cum-janitor pulls a shank out of the bucket’s dirty water and goes to town on the prison guards. The prisoner in question, Lee the Sea Devil, then does something so risky and treacherous that you have to hand him an award. He goes into the guard’s room, sets off the alarm, releases all the prisoners in his cellblock, and arms them. He then lets them have a Mexican stand-off with the remaining guards while he skulks in the shadows. After they’re done blowing each other to pieces, he simply walks over the dead bodies and escapes.

At the same time as the prison break, a fisherman named Romli (Yayu A.W. Unru) discovers the body of the man on the bank of a river. He takes the body of the man to the hospital, where he lays in coma for two months. The doctor attending him is Ailin (Chelsea Island, of Street Society and May the Devil Take You) and she has taken a liking to her John Doe patient. One day, the man wakes up and we quickly realize that the man has amnesia. When asked what his name is, he responds “Ishmael”—Ailin is seen reading Moby Dick in his room when she’s off duty.

At about the same time, Lee and his gang are offing one of their clients and his henchmen when he learns that Ishmael may still be alive. He sends a guy to investigate, using the clever ruse of blowing the man’s ear off with a pistol so as to give him a reason to get medical attention. The guy is about to start roughing up Ailin for answers when Ishmael shows up and beats him up with skills that even he didn’t realize he had. That immediately puts a target on his and Ailin’s backs. So when Ailin leaves town for Jakarta for greener pastures, Lee’s men show up looking for Ishmael. When they don’t find him on the bus, they murder everyone aboard and make off with Ailin. Ishmael will now have to remember his past and face it head on if he wants to rescue Ailin.

Headshot feels like The Bourne Identity by way of Avenging Eagle[1], with a little bit of Black Mask thrown in as well. The Bourne influence is obvious both in the amnesia plot and the shaky cam that mars a lot of the fights in the first half. As we learn more about Ishmael’s past, we discover that he one of many who had been trained by Lee to be a soulless killer since childhood. All of Lee’s subordinates were trained in that fashion, including being tossed into a well with other children, starved for days and then forced to fight each other over a bottle of water. Pretty sick stuff, if you ask me. So yeah, the fact that Ishmael’s “father” is the main villain is what makes this movie closer to Avenging Eagle than Azumi. The bit about facing one’s past is also an element of Black Mask, and some of the fights suggest that Lee’s training practically rendered his stronger subjects almost impervious to pain.

The first half is a lot more notable for Ishmael’s interactions with Ailin than for the action itself. When the bad guys step foot on the bus, you actually start feeling worried about her character. That goes double when the killers open fire on all the passengers. Ailin is the emotional core of the film and Chelsea Islan does a good job of making her a compelling character.

You know, Chinese martial arts and action movies—I say “Chinese” to include Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC—have always excelled at creating complex, balletic action sequences, even when dealing with gunplay. Obviously, the fact that many of the best choreographers were trained in Peking Opera has a lot do with it. Japanese movies have traditionally lacked that—although some movies made in the past 20 years benefitted from a generation of filmmakers raised on Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao—but they made up for it with a harder edge, more sleaze and just general weirdness. Indonesia it would seem—and this goes back to the 80s and the days of Barry Prima—just went for the blood and guts.

Headshot is no exception. In fact, the film is so needlessly violent and gory that it often becomes simply unpleasant to watch. Admittedly, I don’t consider myself a gorehound, so I may not be the best person to judge a movie like this. But this film is just vicious. Innocent people are blown away without a second thought. People get stabbed in the neck, which scenes are always followed by dark-red aterial sprays. A good portion of the characters die after spewing half a pint of blackish-red blood from their mouths. One character gets a face full of flesh wounds after a shotgun goes off a few inches from it. Another character gets stabbed through both cheeks with a machete. And the list goes on. If it had been released to theaters (instead of streamed on Netflix), it would have been saddled with an NC-17 rating.

The action sequences often emphasize the violence and brutality as opposed to the ballet of the actual movements, at least in the first half. This comes to a head during a brutal showdown between Ishmael and a number of killers at a police station. Ishmael and his opponents tear each other to pieces while dead policemen, covered in blood from slit throats, “watch on” in the background. These early fights are a bit too shaky and chaotic for their own good, with a bit too much handheld camerawork.

The martial arts action improves in the second half, as Ishmael has to contend with his “father’s” top killers. The first big fight pits Iko Uwais against Very Tri Yulisman, who played “Bat Boy” in The Raid 2. Yulisman’s fighting style involves a retractable steel baton, much like Donnie Yen in Sha Po Lang. There is some very good fast-hands, lighting-fast exchanges of blocks and strikes during this sequence. It is a wonder that after blocking so many blows from a baton, that Ishmael’s arms haven’t been reduced to jelly. The following fight is a rematch between Iko Uwais and Julie Estelle, who played the Hammer Girl in The Raid 2. This time, Estelle fights with a nasty-looking hunting knife. There are some nice evasive moves and complex exchanges of handwork, plus some flashy takedown moves executed by Estelle, too. Once more, the fact that Uwais gets sliced up as much as he does and still fights suggests that he’s nothing less than a 701 soldier from Black Mask.

The best is saved for last, when Iko Uwais and Sunny Pang face off. Pang has obviously trained in Chinese martial arts, so his uses what looks to be a mixture of the Tiger and Eagle claw styles, mainly the former. Between his fighting style, his mustache, and his general air of ruthlessness, Sunny Pang is like the spiritual successor to Chan Sing in this movie. In any case, the fight choreography here is simply astounding and makes up for the shakiness for the action earlier in the movie. These two just tear each other to pieces, often literally, given the styles used. And like any other action sequence in this movie, it ends on an rather gory note, which goes to remind us that yes, this is what you get when you have a bunch of horror directors make an action movie. At least they’re consistent, I suppose.

In the end, Headshot is a strange beast. You have these really good fights in the last act, plus some nice character interaction between the leads. But these are distributed amidst a sea of hyper-violent excess that will undoubtedly turn off some viewers, even those who enjoy martial arts mayhem. That makes it hard for me to rate this film. If violence for the sake of violence doesn’t bother you, you’ll certainly find a lot to enjoy here. If it does, beware. It may not be worth sitting through for some good fights later on.

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[1] - By extension, you could swap Avenging Eagle for Naked Weapon or Azumi and get a similar result.