Review: The Night Comes For Us
I’ve got to feel kinda bad for the Indonesian action genre, since now every one of them is going to be compared with The Raid, Headshot suffered from being too similar to the extent of involving two of the main actors from the series. Now we have The Night Comes For Us, an Indonesian action film from the director of Headshot and featuring two of main actors from The Raid.
But where The Night Comes For Us succeeds is in being such an intense and violent ride that you don’t care what similarities it has, you just want to see how far it’ll go.
The film follows Ito, one of six elite enforcers for the South Asian Triad known as The Six Seas who enacts violent retribution against anyone who goes against the Triad. After an attack on an seaside village, Ito finds a little girl called Reina as the sole survivor and against his orders he betrays the Six Seas and takes Reina under his care, returning to his hometown of Jakarta to hide with his ex-girlfriend Shinta and finds help with his old gang members, Fatih, Wisnu and drug addict Bobby.
A fellow ex-gang member turned Triad Club Owner Arian is contacted by his boss Chien Wu who tells him of Ito’s betrayal and tasks him with killing Ito and Reina, enlisting the help of an enforcement unit led by partners Elena and Alma to hunt them down. With nowhere truly safe, Ito has to use all his trained brutality to kill the Triad before they kill him.
In all honesty the story is probably the weakest part of the film, it works on a base level, hero has to kill the villains to protect the girl but does fall apart in some regard especially when the reasoning for Ito and Reina being on the kill-list doesn’t seem to go above ‘Because I said so’. The film also switches focus about half-way through, introducing a new plotline with a mysterious female called The Operative and her own mission that ties into Ito’s. It’s a nice change because there are some genuinely shocking moments that lead into it but it’s not subtle about how quickly it changes gears to move towards the third act.
Acting was pretty decent for an action film, it did ultimately come down to liking the heroes, hating the villains and feeling ambivalent to those in-between but it worked. Shinta is the weakest character because she’s barely given anything to do despite her history with Ito and she’s one of those who disappears in the second half, never to be mentioned again. Reina is also given very little to work with but she’s a kid in a violent adult world so it made sense for her to be more pot device than character.
Fatih, Wisnu and Bobby are a mixed bag, Wisnu is sadly fairly forgettable, Fatih fairs better with him knowing how dangerous it is to help Ito but doing it anyway because it’s the right thing to do and using his connections to give Ito an edge. The best of them was Bobby who instead of being a worthless drug addicted mess was this manic, ultra-crazed monster with a rage that was palpable through the screen, easily one of the best characters in the film and not given nearly enough screen time.
As the main villain, Chein Wu isn’t given a lot to work with being way too background to make an impact, instead that role goes to Arian played by The Raid alum Iko Uwais. When we first meet Arian he’s beating up gang members who attacked one of his waitresses so his moral compass is in the right place and that sets precedent for who he is as a person, despite being the main antagonist he’s not a full villain, maybe an anti-villain with his action being to expand his own standing within the Triad but his past friendship with Ito has him taking chances to keep things from getting too violent but knowing he may have to kill his friend if he needs to. Being suited and usually calm makes for a nice juxtaposition to the crazed Ito but there’s not denying both of them are evenly matched for fighting prowess.
With Arian on the scale of Lawful Evil it fell to the brutal pairing of Alma and Elena to fill out the Chaotic Evil portion of the film. Alma was one of the head Triad members with her own enforcement squad and Elena was her best soldier/lover, the two of them had a good dynamic with Alma doing all the talking – and occasionally getting in on the action with her razor wire – and Elena being the strong silent type with a love of disembowelment. Both were more good than great but they added to the absolute madness of the film as a whole.
Reluctantly helping Ito was the mysterious woman known only as The Operative (played by another Raid alum, Julie ‘Hammer Girl’ Estelle). Despite not coming into the film until the second half Estelle makes her mark fairly quickly with her cool fighting style and proficiency with guns and explosives. Her goals involve Ito but not in the way you expect and their pairing comes off more as ‘The Enemy of My Enemy’ than anything else but she’s more than capable to hold her own and her fight against Alma and Elena is one of the film’s most brutal scenes.
And speaking of brutal, the main character Ito (played by yet another Raid star, Joe Taslim) captures that near perfectly, if you break his character down then he does carry the cliché of ‘assassin with a heart of gold’ but there is a little bit more to him than that, Ito is not a bad person but he’s fallen so far down a bad path than until Reina he didn’t believe there was a way back. Much like Arian is an anti-villain, Ito is very much an anti-hero with his maddening skills with violence, there is no limit to how much he’s willing to hurt and slaughter everyone in his way, there’s a great dichotomy with him in that his goals are pure but this methods are insane, you like him as a character but fuck if you’re not scared of him.
Where the film shines is in the direction from Timo Tjahjanto, he’s learnt from Headshot and eased up on the clichéd uselessness but more than that he’s allowed himself to let fucking loose, it’s not on the same level as The Raid but it’s the closest film I’ve seen yet. By the time the film reaches the Butcher shop about 25 minutes in and you’re watching a bad guy get half a leg-bone to his fucking chest and you’re not on board then this isn’t the film for you. Everything from gunshots to throat slitting to gut ripping to head smashing to crotch stabbing, all of it plays a part among some great martial arts fighting, all played out with truly hard-hitting violence.
What Tjahjanto does best with directing the fight scenes is that he doesn’t fall into the modern trap of fast-paced editing in place of actual action, with every fight scene you follow each and every punch and feel them just as much. There are several moments which will make you wince with just how brutal they can get, the Butcher Shop fight is an early example but Alma and Elena Vs The Operative had some graphic depictions of just how close the female levels of violence was to the men’s and the Warehouse Finale brings Ito to his manic best with him using crowbars, machetes, shotguns and snooker balls as weapons against a mass of henchmen. A shock attack on Fitah’s apartment at the end of the first half not only utilised Bobby to his best but actively brought a sense of sheer desperation and depression that I never expected in a martial arts films, there’s moments like that throughout that just feel like extra levels of creativity and freshness to what could’ve easily been a bog-standard action film.
I’m always going to feel bad for comparing films like this to The Raid but the similarities are too obvious to avoid, and yet despite that, calling The Night Comes For Us the closest thing yet is still high praise. While the story isn’t perfect for anything other than an excuse to get people fighting we’re given a host of good characters with Ito and Arian making a great pairing and Tjahjanto proves himself to be a great new action director some of the most brutal, graphic and insane fights put to the film in a while, this is pure unadulterated madness and it’s incredible to witness.
8.5/10