The Night Comes For Us (2018)

The Night Comes for Us (2018)
Original Title: Malam Datang untuk Kita
Translation: Night Comes For Us

 

Starring: Joe Taslim, Iko Uwais, Julie Estelle, Abimana Aryasatya, Asha Kenyeri Bermudez, Sunny Pang, Zack Lee, Dimas Anggara, Salvita Decorte. Hannah Al Rashid, Dian Sastrowardoyo
Director: Timo Tjahjanto
Action Director: Muhammad Irfan, Iko Uwais, Very Tri Yulisman

 

The Raid: Redemption was a revelation for action junkies all over the world, especially those who hadn’t gotten the chance to watch Merantau. Just as Ong Bak had put Thailand and Tony Jaa on the map, The Raid put both Iko Uwais and Indonesia back on the map. I say “back,” because I’m going to believe that there was a period back in the 1980s or so that Barry Prima’s ultraviolent martial arts films made it to shelves at video stores across the nation. Most viewers probably didn’t realize that it was an Indonesian film (as opposed to a Hong Kong or Taiwanese one), but I belt they saw something special nonetheless. But where was I again?

Oh yeah, The Raid. So yeah, that movie restored our faith in action movies at a time that Jet Li no longer had his heart in the game, Jackie Chan was branching out into movies whose scripts probably needed a rewrite or three, and it was becoming clear that Panna Rittikrai was the only driving force behind the Thai revolution. Gareth Evans and his crew followed up the one-two punch of Merantau and The Raid: Redemption with a sequel to the latter, which was even bloodier, grittier AND ambitious than the first one. It truly was a crime epic in which bone-crushing martial arts was the modus operandi of the criminals.

That was followed up, at least in terms of release date, with Headshot, another action thriller headlined by Iko Uwais. However, director Gareth Evans by this point was wanting to branch out beyond martial arts potboilers, and so the directing duties fell to Timo Tjahjanto and Kimo Stamboel. The former was more of a horror director, and the violence and mean-spiritedness of that particular genre was present…to a fault. For all the good fight sequences in Headshot, there was a sense of gratuitousness to it that made it hard for me to enjoy the film on the whole.

The Night Comes For Us was several years in the making, with production starting even before Headshot. Somehow, money became an issue and production stalled. Eventually things got back on track and the film was finished, not to mention a graphic novel based on the same. The final result is even more violent and brutal than the films mentioned above, but director Tjahjanto somehow makes it work. More on that later.

The drug trade in Southeast Asia is controlled by The Triad, which works principally out of the Golden Triangle in the Mekong River basin. Working below the higher-ups are sextet of powerful enforcers known as the Six Seas, whose job it is to protect the shipping routes and keep their jurisdictions in order. We first meet a little girl, Reina (Asha Kenyeri Bermudez), as she’s waking up on a beach somewhere in Indonesia. As she surveys her surroundings, she notices that a fishing village—her village—is in flames. The three remaining her survivors, including her parents, are rounded up and mowed down, execution style, by a bunch of drug dealers under the command of Ito (Joe Taslim, of The Raid: Redemption and Mortal Kombat). The scene ends with the dealers turning their guns on Reina…

Shortly thereafter, a young lady in Jakarta, Shinta (Salvita Decorte, of DreadOut), hears sounds in her appointment. She discovers Reina sitting inside her bathtub and Ito, who appears to be her ex-lover, stumbling into the bathroom with a bullet wound. Shinta unwillingly nurses him back to the health wondering just where the hell he’s been for the past few years. Ito refuses to tell her what’s going on, and Shinta tells him that she brought his old buddies back to help him. Those would be Fatih (Gundala’s Abimana Aryasatya), Wisnu (Dimas Anggara, of Sri Asih) and a hulking junkie named White Bob (Zack Lee, of The Raid 2 and Headshot). All of them were close friends and local hoods before Bob’s drug habit got them all involved with The Triad. Although Ito rose through the ranks because of his fighting skills and ruthlessness in battle, the others seemed to have stayed at the lower rungs of the crime game. Anyway, Ito asks them to help him get a fake passport for himself and Reina so he can leave Asia and start anew somewhere else.

The problem is that The Triad is like S.P.E.C.T.R.E. of the James Bond movies, you really can’t so much as sneeze without someone finding out and reporting it to someone else. Whatever happened at the fishing village has left the top brass of The Triad upset, so they’ve turned his case over to another one of the Six Seas, a man named Chien Wu (Sunny Pang, of Headshot). Chien Wu enlists the help of Ito’s best friend Arian (Iko Uwais), who’s currently running a casino in Macau. Arian has to kill his best friend. If he’s successful, he takes Ito’s place as one of the Six Seas. Like John Wick in the third film of that series, Ito will soon be hunted all over Jakarta by every low-ranking thug and elite Triad assassin in SE Asia. And then there’s the wild card…a mysterious motorcycle-riding, uzi-packing hitwoman named The Operator (Julie Estelle, of Headshot and The Raid 2)…

Much like The Raid 2, this film is set in the criminal underground almost completely removed from regular society, while simultaneously occupying the same plane and spilling over into it (with deadly results). Like that film, the police are depicted as being little more than corrupt pawns of the drug lords and crime kingpins, all thirsting after their share of the pie. This film is definitely bleaker than The Raid 2, since there’s almost no sign of true morality left in this world, outside the characters of Shinta and Reina. At least The Raid movies had some honest cops. This one has none.

After the opening massacre, of which we only see the tail end, the film is mainly about criminals and crooks bashing in the heads of other criminals and crooks. I think that was what made me like the film more than Headshot, which featured so many civilian casualties that it got sadistic. People are literally torn to pieces as they desperately hack at each other in the name of duty, honor, survival or blind obedience to gang rules. Although the deaths of some of the protagonists are touching, this is mainly a film about the scum of the Earth floating on the surface of a bloodbath of their own making. That makes the violence easier to take.

And violence there is. With the exception of maybe two characters, every main character, supporting character, stuntman and extra is shot, stabbled, beaten, sliced, diced, run through, bashed, smashed, crushed, brained, torn asunder, mutilated, maimed, disembowled, dismembered, eviscerated, lacerated or blown to bits. This would have gotten an easy NC-17 in theaters had Netflix not released it to its platform with an MA rating. It is, as of this moment, the goriest, most violent martial arts film that I have personally ever seen. There. I’ve said it.

The action was staged by Iko Uwais, with help from from Muhammad Irfan (Headshot) and Very Tri Yulisman, who played the bat-swinging killer in The Raid 2. Like The Raid 2, our action directors shoot for Variety in each set piece. So you have one-on-many fights; two-on-one fights; one-on-one fights; fights in closed quarters; group melees, and fights with weapons. Unlike Merantau, where the fights were just starting to get repetitive before the strong climax started, this movie keeps us viewers on its toes.

After a short, but vicious fight at a Macau casino, the first major set piece will determine where you really stand with this movie. Ito shows up at a butcher’s shop that serves as a front for some low-level drug running. The owner had apparently stolen a sizable sum from White Bob some time before, and Ito needs that money to help him flee.  This results in a fight inside the meat locker that starts off as your standard show of fisticuffs…but then buzzsaws, machetes, cleavers and jagged bone fragments figure into the madness. You will ask yourself how the film can get any more violent…and then it proceeds to best itself with each successive fight.

By the time we reach the final series of fights, you will have seen a film that proudly stands with the Day of the Dead and Evil Dead remakes as the goriest films of all time. And those last fights are a doozy. One of them pits Julie Estelle against a pair of lesbian assassins. One of them wields a wicked curved knife, or kris, while the other has a razor-sharp garotte that can slice through human flesh like provolone cheese. It’s one of those classic femme fatale moments where highly-trained women just ruthlessly beat the shit out of each other until one or more of them are dead. It’s like the Bride/Vernita Green fight from Kill Bill Vol. 1 cranked up to OVER NINE THOUSAND!

The movie ends on a brutal showdown between Joe Taslim and Iko Uwais. The latter has long since established him as a martial arts badass and needs no introduction. His machine-gun punches remind me of Donnie Yen doing the same in Ip Man, and he’s no slouch in the kicking department either. But Joe Taslim has progressed a lot since The Raid: Redemption. What is interesting is that Taslim is not a Silat expert like Uwais, but a national judo champion. You can see that in his fights: he fights with less technique and more brutality when it comes to fisticuffs, but his throws, locks, takedowns and ground fighting are just BOSS. And this is a fight where the two are also attacking each other with pipes and box cutters in addition to their limbs. By the time the fight ends, they have spilled more blood between the two of them than an Aztec sacrificial platform. Along with The Raid 2’s Iko Uwais vs. Cecep Arif Rahman climax and Headshot’s final scuffle between Uwais and Sunny Pang, the finale of this film is one for the ages and sits atop the pile of Best Final Fights (and Best One-on-One Fights) of the new millennium.