Movie Review: The Night Comes for Us

The Night Comes for Us ** / *****

Directed by: Timo Tjahjanto.

Written by: Timo Tjahjanto.

Starring: Iko Uwais (Arian), Joe Taslim (Ito), Julie Estelle (The Operator), Shareefa Daanish (Triad's Sniper), Sunny Pang (Chien Wu), Zack Lee (Bobby), Hannah Al Rashid (Elena), Dian Sastrowardoyo (Alma), Salvita Decorte (Shinta), Epy Kusnandar (Night Handler), Dimas Anggara (Wisnu), Abimana Aryasatya (Fatih), Morgan Oey (Arian's Assistant), Asha Kenyeri Bermudez (Reina), Ronny P. Tjandra (Aliong), Revaldo (Yohan).

 

The Night Comes for Us is essentially two straight hours of people kicking, stabbing, shooting and otherwise killing each other in the bloodiest way imaginable, in one extended fight sequence after another, intercut with scenes of exposition, which are both needlessly complicated and utterly boring. The story essentially comes down to one assassin being sent to kill another assassin who has decided he wants to stop being an assassin and after several hundred people (I don’t think I’m exaggerating) get brutally killed, and gallons of fake blood is spilled on every surface, the two – who, oh yes, were once friends – finally do face off against each other. No bonus points for guessing it is an abandoned warehouse, because it’s always in an abandoned warehouse, unless it’s in a parking garage, that looks like an abandoned warehouse – but since they get that location out of the way in the first hour, you know what’s coming.

 

There is nothing inherently wrong with movies that almost all action, and very little of anything else. Asian action cinema has certainly always had films like that – and they reached their peak with the John Woo films of the later 1980 and early 1990s. But even in films like The Killer and Hardboiled, there was some plot, some characters to care about, and the storytelling was as operatic as the gun battles were. Director Timo Tjahjanto clearly knows how to direct a bloody action sequence – the action is what worked best in last year’s Headshot, which he co-directed – and he gets points for just all the ways he comes up with killing people in this film. He would have to, considering hundreds of people die, in all sorts of ways.

 

And yet, like Headshot, Tjahjanto doesn’t quite realize that he either needs a plot that makes you care about the characters being killed or doing the killing, or else stripped to the bone so it doesn’t matter. Both films are needlessly long – The Night Comes for Us goes on for more than two hours, and Headshot is nearly as long – when at 80-85 minutes, you may have a kickass action, at that length, you have a slog. His best work as a director was co-directing a segment of VHS 2 – where he still went on longer than everyone else – but had a limit of just how indulgent he could be. Here, there is no such limit.

 

The result is a film that eventually gives you a headache, because it’s just straight ahead blood for huge, long stretches, followed by needless exposition. What we really need to know is that “good guy”, Ito (Joe Taslim) has a job working for the top smugglers in the area that gives him license to kill without consequences, as long as the good keep flowing, but even he has his limits. After slaughtering pretty much an entire town, he cannot bring himself to kill a little girl – and decides to run off with her instead. This makes his bosses angry, so they send his best friend Arian (Iko Uwais – because of course it is) to kill him. This is perhaps what counts for stretching for Iko Uwais, who most of the time would be the “hero” of the film – and he shows us why, because he is completely unable to pull off the dramatic side of this role. But don’t worry, he still knows how to kill people real good.

 

And the killing is why most will see the film. And make no mistake, the killing is done with skill – whether it’s in the apartment scene or the parking garage scene or the butcher shop scene (that one’s probably the best – because they use parts of animal’s carcasses to kill each other) and a half dozen other ones. Taken individually, all of these scenes may well be good unto themselves – even if they all undeniably go on too long. Stacked on top of each other, they grow dull.

 

There is skill to Tjahjanto to be sure – but I think if he’s going to make a truly good movie at some point, he needs to work with someone else’s screenplay – a tight, 90 minute films, with several action sequences not wall to wall bloodletting. That may well be what he needs – because right now, no matter how much skill is on display, it all feels like one long, bloody slog.