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.

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.

Merantau (2009)

Merantau (2009)
aka: Merantau Warrior 

Starring: Iko Uwais, Cisca Jessica, Christine Hakim, Mads Koudal, Alex Abbad, Laurent Busson, Yayan Ruhian
Director: Gareth Evans
Action Director: Iko Uwais, Yayan Ruhian

This film never got an official release here in Brazil. In 2010 or 2011, when São Paulo was having one of its annual “Cultural Weekends,” there was one porn theater that changed its venue to martial arts films for 48 consecutive hours and this film was one of the movies shown. There was the Cultural Center of São Paulo that also showed it last year, but I was in the middle of moving, so I didn’t get around to seeing it. It was thanks to a friend in the States that I finally got a copy of it to watch..

The film, in many respects, is literally Ong Bak transplanted from Thailand to Indonesia. Iko Uwais plays Yuda, a tomato picker somewhere in rural Indonesia who’s a devout Muslim (yes, Indonesia houses the largest Muslim population in the entire world, not in part because it is also one of the most densely-populated countries in the world, period) and like his predecessors Tang Lung and Ting, spends much of his free time practicing martial arts, mainly Silat. The time has come for his “merantau,” or wandering, where he must head off to the modern world to live and decide what he’ll ultimately do with his life.

While chasing down a young pickpocket, Adit (Yusuf Aulia), Yuda stumbles across the kid’s sister, a stripper, being manhandled by her employer, Johni (Alex Abbad, of The Raid 2). Yuda comes to the girl’s rescue (whose name is Astri and is played by Triangle the Dark Side's Cisca Jessica). This results in Astri being fired from her job. And if that isn’t bad enough, we soon learn that Johni does freelance work for a pair of Eurotrash white slavers who need one more girl for their next shipment. It looks like Johni isn’t finished with Astri after all. But now, he’ll have to deal with her knight in shining armor: Yuda. Things get bone-crushingly violent fast.

In many respects, this film is better than Ong Bak and many of its Thai contemporaries, even if the film initially follows the same story template. Much of it has to with how Gareth handles the story, which is simple, but focused enough to know which buttons to press and is infinitely more compelling (especially in this post-Weinstein environment) than “bumpkin goes after a severed Buddha head.” It also helps that Iko Uwais is a better actor than Tony Jaa and is a lot more charismatic than his predecessor, who would spend large swaths of film not saying a word, lacking the experience to emote through his facial expressions. The villains, played by Danish actor Mads Koudal (Copenhagen Ninja) and French actor Laurent Busson (who had a small role in Silver Hawk), are an interesting pair, having some sort of deep personal friendship that isn’t explored, but frequently hinted at. I would’ve liked to have seen more interaction between them, just to know what that relationship actually was.

Most importantly, there’s the action. I’m guessing this is one more purer showcases of the Indonesia martial art Silat on film. I like how the early fights show Uwais trying to use his skills more defensively, as if to only subdue and neutralize his opponents without doing major damage to them. After that gets him a beating in an alleyway fight, he switches to the offensive and goes all Tony Jaa on everyone. Obviously, I prefer the latter to the former, although it helps set the early fights apart from the later ones. Interesting is how Silat influences not only Uwais’ fighting style, but seeps into the way the guy moves in otherwise ordinary situations. Much like Yuen Biao in Dragons Forever, Yuda can’t even walk without doing some bizarre sidestepping movements that are probably associated with the style. What’s especially impressive, is how Silat employs a lot of low, deep stances, and yet those never seem to keep Uwais from moving quickly and delivering lightning-fast footwork (compare with Jet Li’s lecture on traditional stances in Fist of Legend).

The fights are staged without editing tricks and wires to “assist” the actors’ abilities, which it seems that even Hong Kong and China can’t avoid anymore, even when working with top-tier talent like Tony Jaa and Wu Jing. There are some wince-inducing moments, mainly when Uwais takes on contingent of hired stooges in, on and around a series of shipping containers at the end. But that’s only an appetizer for the real finale, where he does a one-on-two against the European villains, in a fight whose setup is reminiscent of the finale of Who Am I? Mads Koudal does mainly hand-based attacks early on, where Laurent Busson is very obviously a talented kicker, and gets nice moves in, including what seems like a killer axe kick. The choreography here is stunning, and even the characters are on the ground, they get off some great ground-based kicks as well. Then the two chase Uwais into the network of containers armed with lead pipes and we get something out of Blonde Fury.

I can see the print of 80s Hong Kong films in the fight, with the Silat style being used to set things apart. It works fine for the most part, although there are some moments when it feels like the action could be varied more. However, that final fight makes the film worth watching by itself. Add to that some credible acting by the leads and good action design all around and you have a little gem worth checking out.

The Raid: Redemption (2011)

The Raid: Redemption (2011)
aka: Serbuan Maut
Translation: The Raid Killed

Starring: Iko Uwais, Ananda George, Ray Sahetapy, Donny Alamsyah, Joe Taslim, Yayan Ruhian, Pierre Gruno, Tegar Satrya
Director: Gareth Evans
Action Director: Gareth Evans, Iko Uwais, Yayan Ruhian

A couple of years ago, during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had an idea for a book called Zen of Kung Fu Cinema: Reflections on the Canon. It was to be a collection of essays about the top 25 or so martial arts movies in “the canon” of the genre. I would attempt to forego the usual review format and shoot for a fresh take for each movie discussed. I also brought in a number of author friends to make a contribution. They included Scott Blasingame (TheNightDragon series); Kyle Fiske (Dragons and Boxers); Michael Lauck (The Grand Tournament); and Keith Allison[1] of Teleport-City, who has been reviewing kung fu movies (in addition to numerous other genres from world cinema) since the late 1990s. I even invited El Santo of 1000 Misspent Hours and Counting to do a write-up, but he eventually declined on account of not knowing enough about the genre to comment on it, even though I wanted an essay from a more casual fan and grindhouse junky.

So how I did I determine which movies were in “The Canon”? I basically started by combing the internet for about fifty or so Top 10 (or 20 or 50) Martial Arts Movies Lists and tallied up the results. That is, the more inclusions on these lists, the higher that film’s ranking. I was satisfied with the end results, a healthy mixture of old school and contemporary martial arts movies—with the exception of Kung Fu Panda, which I ignored completely on the grounds of my own “No Animated Movies” rule. In any case, I set about working on this project.

As is par for the course with me, I get extremely self-conscious when writing non-fiction, mainly because there are few approaches that haven’t already been done (and done better) by people with better academic credentials than me, and who have seen more than my own measly 780 Chinese movies. I eventually halted the project and moved on to something else, which itself got abandoned in favor me simply restarting my old site. You can see some of my unused essays at this site. See the reviews for Fist of Fury; Enter the Dragon; Way of the Dragon; Master of the Flying Guillotine; Fist of Legend; and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The Raid: Redemption also made it to the canon at number 21, pretty good for a movie made only nine years earlier (as to when I started tallying up the results of the articles) competing against 50 years of genre history[2]. The question that stands is: what approach would I have taken to discuss this movie?

I suppose I could have discussed the stripped-down nature of the story. It is simplicity defined: in Indonesia, a SWAT team storms an apartment complex run by a drug kingpin. The locale’s tenants are mainly junkies, dealers, petty criminals, and the kingpin’s own personal army. It doesn’t take long for the SWAT team to get mowed down in a violent firefight inside a stairwell. With snipers surrounding the building and dozens of machete-wielding goons wandering the halls, the survivors have to fight for their lives. The story was more or less copied by the following year’s Dredd, which also pitted the superhero Judge Dredd and his new partner against a building full of drug dealers. I have also seen people compare the second Purge movie to The Raid, although the parallels are a bit sketchier. The story is arguably thinner than your average Jackie Chan film, although the storytelling is simply superb.

We can talk about the fight action, which most people will remember this movie for. There are five major fights, at least four of which are “certified classics.” The first major fight is set on the 7^th Floor, in which Iko Uwais takes on a dozen or so men armed with machetes with a knife and police baton. There is a certain Wow factor to the proceedings, as Uwais must fend off and dodge attacks coming from multiple angles, very much like a vintage Jackie Chan film. The choreography is suitably complex, mixing knife and baton attacks with “economical” kicks—most of which are aimed no higher than stomach level. There is also a certain “ick!” factor in the fights, notably as Uwais not only stabs several of his opponents, but often drags the blade across the limb in order to up the pain factor. After all, a huge gaping wound in your leg will definitely take away your will to fight.

After a suspenseful interlude in the apartment of an honest man (Ananda George) and his sick wife, Uwais finds himself face-to-face with an even scarier band of men brandishing machetes. This time, however, he is completely unarmed. Thus, we get the big fight on Floor 8, where Uwais has to contort his body in dozens of different ways, not to mention roll on the floor, in order to not get sliced to ribbons. Uwais gets off a lot of ground-based kicks in this sequence and the choreography is just astounding. The first time I watched this movie, I had wondered how the other fights were going to top that first one. I admit that I was a little afraid that the first fight was going to be the best of the entire film. That has happened too many times for my taste. Thankfully, director Gareth Evans and company knew what they were doing and kept the suspense only growing. The major “ick!” moment is when Uwais does a backward jumping takedown on a young assailant, ramming the broken shards of a door through the kid’s throat.

The fight between the drug kingpin’s chief enforcer, Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian, of Beyond Skyline and John Wick 3), and Sergeant Jaka (Joe Taslim of Mortal Kombat), is pretty solid. It’s not exactly a classic, but it’s intense enough.

Not too long afterward, we have a big group brawl on Floor 15, where the kingpin keeps his drug lab. Rama (Uwais) and two other policemen—Dagu (Eka Ramahdia) and the corrupt Lieutenant Wahyu (Pierre Gruno)—fight off all of workers. The Floor 7 fight was weapon-against-weapon. The Floor 8 fight was unarmed-against-weapon. The Floor 15 is mainly unarmed-against-unarmed, although a few goons carry the standard machete. This fight is very Jackie Chan in its presentation, with characters fighting in, on and around tables, or using the scenery as weapons, including shelves and filing cabinets. The kicking is a bit flashier than in the other fights, both from Uwais and his opponents.

The climax is a long and brutal—no, that word is overused—long and feral two-on-one between Rama, his brother Andi (Donny Alamsyah), and Mad Dog. One great aspect of this fight is the subtle characterization of Mad Dog in this scene. The man is a ferocious, take-no-prisoners mob enforcer type, but he prefers the thrill of personal combat to the simplicity of a firearm. When Rama steps into the room where Mad Dog is torturing Andi, Mad Dog stops what he’s doing and lowers the chain that suspends Andi. He patiently waits as Rama frees his brother. Once Andi is mobile again, Mad Dog approaches them and gestures for them to give him a bit of space. From there, a blistering fight starts as the brothers double team Mad Dog. On one hand, there is strength in numbers. On the other, Andi isn’t quite the trained fighter his brother and Mad Dog are. Moreover, Andi is also injured and Rama is probably completely exhausted by this point. So Mad Dog, the superior fighter of the three, has the bigger advantage.

Both Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian are masters of the Indonesian Silat martial arts. Yayan trained in Pencak Silat, in addition to other styles, like Silat Harimau and Silat Minang. He was also a professional instructor before he started appearing in movies, so his fighting cred is pretty hard to argue with. Iko Uwais also started his silat training at age 10 and was a national champion at age 22. He was also running a martial arts school when he was discovered by Gareth Evans. I point this out because this fight becomes a pure silat clinic in the best sense possible. Ruhian and Uwais conduct this beautiful symphony of punches, blogs, throws, holds, breaks and kicks. Yayan does some very flexible kicks, reminiscent of the sort that Ken Low could do on his best days. One notable kick is where Ruhian throws a front kick, then switches it into a heel kick to his opponent’s head, and, missing his target, brings his leg down to a roundhouse to his opponent’s knee. Watch Ruhian as he uses his shorter stature to his advantage, performing spinning elbow strikes on his opponents’ knees. Or watch Ruhian get put in a strangehold from behind, only to jump and kick out with both legs, using the falling momentum to grab his opponent from behind and throw him over his shoulders. This is alone placed Mr. Ruhian on the short list to one of the best martial arts villains in cinema in a LONG time.

One of my observations about Merantau Warrior was that the fight sequences, as good as they were, were starting to feel a little repetitive by the end of the movie. Not enough to dampen my enjoyment of the film as a whole, but enough to make me wonder if future Indonesian movies might eventually lose their spark. Gareth Evans and company certainly learned a bit about action direction in the meantime, making sure to keep the fights varied and the difficulty progressively harder until the finale, when the protagonists took on a night-invincible little fighting machine (and adrenaline addict, it would seem). I have yet to watch The Raid 2 as of writing this review, but it is certainly the next movie on the list.

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[1] - Keith is so important to the fandom that he has been quoted on Brazilian DVD releases of Shaw Brothers films like The Shaolin Prince and The Crippled Avengers, the former of which he hadn’t even seen before I brought it to his attention!

[2] - Or in some cases, sixty or more as some lists included films like Yojimbo and The Seven Samurai.

Triple Threat (2019)

Triple Threat (2019)

Starring: Tony Jaa, Tiger Chen, Iko Uwais, Celina Jade, Michael Jai White, Scott Adkins, Michael Bisping, Ron Smoorenberg
Director: Jesse V. Johnson
Action Director: Tim Man

 

Triple Threat comes across as being the East-Southeast Asian equivalent to The Expendables in terms of onscreen talent. It started life as a vehicle for Chinese martial artist Tiger Chen (Man of Tai Chi and The Kung Fu Traveler films) called The Makeshift Squad. That project did not go forward, but eventually evolved into this film, teaming him with Thai action sensation Tony Jaa and Indonesia heavy hitter Iko Uwais (Merantau and The Raid movies). Michael Jai White, who had previously worked with Jaa on The Skin Trade, joined the project, as did Scott Adkins. Frequent Adkins collaborator Jesse V. Johnson—Green Street Hooligans 2; Savage Dog; Accident Man; and The Debt Collector—took on directing duties and needless to say, expectations were high. The project was announced in 2017 and had wrapped up production the following year. It saw theatrical release in China in early 2019 and got an American DVD release shortly afterward.

The film is set in the fictional Southeast Asian nation of Maha Jaya (played by Thailand). Rampant criminal activity has posed a threat to the hardworking Chinese community there, thus giving us a subtle-but-visible pro-Chinese message. This prompts a filthy-rich heiress, Xiao Xian (Celina Jade, also of The Skin Trade), to give up her pampered lifestyle and dedicate herself to ridding the country of the criminal element and boosting the local economy. Obviously, not everybody is going to like this sort of humanitarian mission.

Switch to the jungles of Maha Jaya, where a team of mercenaries led by Deveraux (White) is searching for prisoner camp. Assisting them are two trackers, Long Fei (Chen) and Payu (Jaa), former military officers. When they reach the camp, a Predator-esque shootout commences and the mercenaries make short work of the opposing soldiers. Among the dead is the wife of one of the guards, Jaka (Uwais). He scuffles briefly with Payu before being knocked out by the concussive force of a grenade explosion. We learn that the “women and children” that the two trackers thought they were rescuing are in fact a ruse: the mercenaries came to free one of their number, Collins (Scott Adkins). Colllins is “rescued” and the camp is destroyed. Only Jaka remains and he has only one thing on his mind: revenge.

Jaka forms an uncomfortable partnership with Long Fei and Payu, whom we learn were betrayed by Deveraux and his men. The Indonesian soldier starts manipulating both groups in his bid for revenge. Meanwhile, Collins and his team have received the order to kill Xiao Xian. Through a series of mishaps, she ends up on the run with Payu and Long Fei. Sooner or later, this is going to translate into some Grade-A mayhem.

Much like The Expendables, the plot of Triple Threat is a thin, frail creature that exists only to get some of the best martial artists in the business into a single film. Evil mercenaries? We’ve seen that a dozen times. Former associates (or comrades) getting betrayed? A dime a dozen. Survivor of an ambush seeking revenge? Pretty standard fare. Anyone expecting anything resembling a thoughtful plot will come away disappointed and would best abandon such expectations from the outset. In fact, you may argue that the movie doesn’t even get its thin plot right: several characters are introduced, but have little bearing on the story, like the Chinese ambassador and Michael Wong’s “only Asian crime boss in Asia who doesn’t speak an Asian language.” Heck, we never even learn the real motives of the femme fatale ordering the hit on Xiao Xian in the first place!

The acting is all over the place. Adkins and Jai White are veterans of this kind of thing, so they’re always fun to watch. Of the three Asian leads, Iko Uwais gives the best performance, demonstrating a knack for drama that his two co-stars visibly lack. Tony Jaa was a charisma vacuum in his earlier years, but has developed a sort of goofy charisma through his work in Hollywood (see xXx: Return of Xander Cage for a good example). That serves him better than when he’s being dead serious like in his Thai films. Tiger Chen is easily the most wooden member of the main cast, although he makes up for it in his fight sequences.

Speaking of which, the action scenes were helmed by Tim Man, best known for his work with Scott Adkins, including the stellar Ninja: Shadow of a Tear. The action is more or less evenly split between 80s-style “bodybuilder with a machine gun” sort of action and the martial arts brawls that most viewers hope to see. There are three big gunfights: the aforementioned scene in the jungle; the assassination attempt on Xiao Xian; and lengthy Terminator-esque sequence in which the mercenaries lay waste to an entire police station. These sequences are definitely more Commando than The Killer, but gorehounds will surely get off on the squibs on display.

The fight action starts off low key, but gradually improves until it reaches “epic” levels at the climax. Tony Jaa has arguably not looked this good since Ong Bak 2. Following the end of the Ong Bak trilogy, his career has been marred by thankless cameos (Master Z: The Ip Man Legacy), unnecessary wire assistance (SPL 2: A Time for Conseqeuences); and general lackluster choreography (Paradox). I’m happy to say that Jaa gives us some of his best fighting of his career, even surpassing the Ong Bak movies in some regards. He doesn’t reach those films in terms of mind-boggling stunts, but he gives all of his best moves—double cartwheel kicks; flip kicks; flying knee smashes, etc.—within the framework of intricately-choreographed exchanges of more basic hand and foot techniques. The crowning achievement is the final fight with Scott Adkins, which starts out as a vicious one-on-one battle, becomes a two-on-one when Iko Uwais joins in, and then ends with Jaa taking Adkins on by himself again. Adkins’ patented flying tae kwon do kicks are all there and the two combatants just put on a great choreography clinic.

Tiger Chen, the Man of Tai Chi himself, gets the second most number of fight scenes. After the opening shootout in the jungle, we meet Chen and Jaa participating in underground fights. Chen gets to fight an irate Iko Uwais in this sequence. Both men participate in a complex exchange of hand techniques, with Chen’s wushu skills getting a nice workout. He also gets to perform a nice jumping double back kick against Uwais, who uses more conventional silat moves. Later on, he gets to face off with British UFC champion Michael Bisping in a more conventional fight. There is some brief wire assistance in one of the grappling moves, but nothing that would take you completely out of the movie. The two have a rematch at the end, which is more of the same, but even more brutal. Once more, Chen is given more opportunity to show off his Northern Longfist handwork and applied tai chi techniques.

Finally, Iko Uwais probably gets the least opportunities to strut his stuff, even if he ultimately the dramatic anchor of the film. Uwais throws down with both Jaa and Chen in the first act. During the big firefight at the police station, Uwais has an all-too brief scuffle with Chocolate’s Jeeja Yanin. Both of them throw a few decent, if unremarkable, kicks before Uwais kills her in a rather excessive way. At the finale, Uwais faces off with Michael Jai White. Although White does not use a lot of his patented aerial kicks, he kills it with the powerful handwork. The Merantau veteran, however, has his best moments in the aforementioned kerfuffle with Tiger Chen. Viewers expecting the next The Raid or Ong Bak will undoubtedly be disappointed with the results of the action. But those who disliked The Expendables 3 because it didn’t have enough violence, fight action, and real action actors, should find a lot to enjoy here.