I’m sure most people think a great action movie is whatever Keanu Reeves or Liam Neeson is going to put out next. No offense to John Wick or Nels Coxman, but the greatest action movies of the past 5+ years have come from an unexpected place: Indonesia. The Raid: Redemption started it all, bringing us the “hero fights up a High Rise building run by criminals” premise to great effect, followed by The Raid 2, which somehow improved on the original. Enter Netflix, which brings The Night Before Us to the United States. Sort of in between the Two Raids, the movie takes a simple story, kick ass fighting, and a reservior’s worth of blood to give us some fight scenes that will be loved and thrown up to in equal measure.
The Night Comes For Us introduces us to the Six Seas, enforcers of the criminal enterprise patrolling Southeast Asia. Ito (Joe Taslim), one of their enforcers, opens the movie mowing down an entire village because they stole drugs from the Triad (the enterprise). However, Ito’s heart can’t bear to kill little Reina (Asha Kenyeri Bermudez), whose parents were just taken from her. To save her, Ito murders his fellow Triad members, excommunicating him from his Six Seas position. Pissed off, the Triad sends Arian (Iko Uwais), to deal with Ito and if successful take Ito’s place in the Six Seas.
The Night Comes For Us succeeds in a similar way to John Wick. It’s clear the Triad has its own rules for engagement and created a warped society of which it is the governing body. Since gun ownership is severely limited, only the bosses/police get the firearms; everyone else has to fight their way into a management position. This is what makes Ito and Arian successful: they worked their way up from nothing into these powerhouses for a crazy powerful organization. In order to survive, you either go it alone and live in the shadows, or you find a clan and fight other clans. Ito goes back to his old buddies: Fatih, Wisnu, and “White Boy” Bobby. Throw in a little haunted past for the clan, and a connection to Arian, and you have yourself a perfectly simple but strong setup for your action film. The movie gives us just enough of that world to make us interested but keep the world mysterious, introducing a woman called The Operator (Julie Estelle) who wants to get rid of The Six Seas, and is clearly going to play a bigger role should this movie get sequels.
And sequels The Night Comes For Us should get on the action sequences alone, which are as good as any action sequences I’ve ever seen put to film. Like the Raids, we get first class action choreography, with a few standout performers who get specialized weapons (boomerang shaped knife, wire saw, among others). Unlike the Raid movies, these weapons unleash rivers of blood when they do damage. The Night Comes For Us totally earns its R Rating with the sheer blood letting going on. As grotesque as it can sometimes look, the action choreography is so good that the movie totally earns someone’s neck being sawed off by the wire saw. And after a fight, everyone’s limping away: there are no superheroes here, just well trained human beings. I say humans, because the women in here might be the most fearful members in the Triad or out of it. There’s a lesbian couple alongside the Operator, and their skill is equally impressive, maybe moreso, than the men. The fight between the Operator and The Lesbians is as compelling as Ito’s fight with Arian, which the movie is building towards. We also get varied fight locations: whether they be claustrophobic (inside a police van), around a pool table, inside a parking garage, etc. That variety of location and participants keeps the fights from growing stale over the heftier 2 hour running time. The fights are so good that I started out really tired watching The Night Comes For Us and was so jacked up by the end I needed an hour to come back down again.
Whatever’s going on in Indonesia’s film industry, keep em coming. The Night Comes For Us makes you 3/3 in my book, with hopefully several years more of reshaping the action genre to come. If you keep this level up, I will personally berate JJ Abrams for how poorly he used all of you in The Force Awakens.