The Night Comes for Us
Director: Timo Tjahjanto
Year Released: 2018
Rating: 2.5
Gang member Ito (Joe Taslim), having a change-of-heart about his career path, saves a little girl's life - and turns on his own men - during a shoot-out, which, as one might expect, leads to a lot of people coming after him. The thinner-than-thin plot - about loyalty and betrayal and whatever else was going on in John Woo's movies - is merely 'in place' to string together multiple fight scenes, each one more brutal than the last, in which bodies are treated as pin cushions (and punctured by machetes, karambits, broken glass, scrap metal, etc.) and fingers gets severed and ripped off and the combatants keep fighting anyway. As an exercise in creative bloodletting it's not exactly there to challenge your brain (or teach you about Indonesian culture, ha) - and I find movies that flirt with nihilism in general to be soul-crushing - but if you're going to make an action picture, it should be as intense and unforgiving as this.
