The Night Comes For Us (Directed by Timo Tjahjanto, Netflix, 2018)
This Indonesian martial arts movie is very much a throwback. Our unstoppable hero punches his way through hordes of endless mooks, each one of which is polite enough to attack solo before meeting their gory finish. The rest are content to wait their turn for a grisly demise, or to run around menacingly in the background for no reason. Except to look cool and pay homage to John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13.
The homages come frequently and the heightened gore and quick dispatch of nameless extras reminds me a lot of Sonny Chiba's The Street Fighter series. Which for those unaware should be taken as a warning. The Street Fighter was rated X when it was released in the US and The Night Comes For Us is cut from the same cloth. This isn't just a violent movie, it's a hard-R violent movie with buckets of blood and horrible deaths. Meat hooks are prominently featured in more than one scene.
The plot is bare bones but what do you want from a martial arts movie? An elite triad assassin has a crisis of conscience and saves a little girl after massacring everyone else in her village for stealing from his crime lord boss. This act of defiance can not be tolerated and the triad declares all out war, sending a battalion of their most-expendable henchmen after the traitorous Ito (The Raid alumnus Joe Taslim). Once the henchmen are dispatched in ignominious single combat, the field is cleared for the elite assassins (who actually have some personality) to arrive.
These include the younger, hipper version of Ito, his conflicted childhood friend Arian (The Raid 2 alumnus Iko Uwais) and a trio of female assassins who dispense with all the brooding and really vamp it up. The Operative (The Raid 2's Julie Estelle) steals the show and appears to be on loan from the Marvel Universe as a graduate of the Black Widow program.
It's not a great movie. It's very retro and that extends to a lot of the fight choreography. There are a few memorable scenes and fatalities, but none of the non-stop razzle dazzle you'd get from The Raid or vintage Jackie Chan. But for a bit of action movie nostalgia there are worse ways to spend two hours.
Notes
- The final fight between Ito and Arian borrows a lot from Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series, by which I mean Warner Brothers cartoons
- I'd like to give props to Ito's gang buddies who bravely join his fight, but *spoiler alert* none of them appeared in The Raid movies. Fortunately they are fun while they last and each gets the kind of cool last stand that guys fantasize about having.
- For some reason I accept this universe's treatment of guns. Guns exist, people use them, they are not dishonorable. They just don't get used much. People are really into stabbing.
- Speaking of which, if you get stabbed? You shouldn't pull out the knife. It's keeping the blood in. Also, walking into the knife so you can punch your opponent at closer range? Not a good idea.
- Fortunately nobody worries about blood because bleeding out isn't a thing. You can get stabbed twenty, thirty times and as long as you have an artfully ripped t-shirt to soak up the blood? You'll be fine.
- One last shout out? To Reina (Asha Bermudez) as the little girl who didn't sign up for any of this. She wakes up, pets her cat, helps mom with breakfast, goes to school. Then everyone she knows is murdered by gunmen, her village is burnt to the ground, and she's kidnapped by an angst-ridden psycho. Her next few days are filled with crazed murderers dying in brutal hand-to-hand combat interspersed with the occasional car chase and everybody is yelling all the time. The kid is going to need either years of therapy or a sequel where she appears as a kick-ass vigilante out for revenge.
