Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Like last month’s Mandy, The Night Comes For Us came for us on the back of a wave of positive Twitter takes, although with more of “hard-hitting chop sockey” vibe than the “my brain has melted and Nic Cage is incredible/terrible/incredibly terrible” feelings that Mandy provokes. You may be asking, dear listener, why I’m talking so much about Mandy in an introductory paragraph for a different film, and well, spoilers, it’s because there’s not all that much of interest in The Night Comes For Us.
Recapping the plot would be a little difficult for reasons we’ll come to, but the short of it is that elite Triad enforcer Ito (Joe Taslim) has a very sudden change of heart in the middle of a good ol’ fashioned village massacre, and decides to protect the last surviving child, Reina (Asha Kenyeri Bermudez), performing a counter-massacre on his former Triad buddies. Injured, he returns home to Jakarta with the kid, holing up in his old girlfriend’s apartment. Spooked, she calls in the old gang of street criminals he used to run with before being elevated to elite henchman.
This turn of events doesn’t go down well with Triad lieutenant Chien Wu (Sunny Pang), who orders that Ito be captured, alongside anyone who gets in their way, enlisting Ito’s former fellow gang member Arian (Iko Uwais) with the task alongside Chien Wu’s own trusted band of weirdos. Cue a bunch of fighting and shooting, in what’s as much of an action movie as a martial arts one.
Unfortunately, though, not a particularly good one. I like to at least pretend to myself that I’m moderately clever, but following what was going on here, and why, was entirely beyond me. To a degree, plot’s immaterial – the best Tony Jaa film is about a man trying to reclaim an elephant – but there’s a basic overall coherence and some sort of character motivation that’s required as a bare minimum, and even with allowance for genre conventions, The Night Comes For Us spectacularly anti-hurdles the lowest possible bar.
For example, a character appears out of nowhere – literally, she walks in out of the mist – and her interest in proceedings is never explained, nor is she even named – seemingly because by that point they’d killed off all bar one of the protagonists and wanted to have some more fight scenes.
Even then, those fight scenes, which should be the movie’s saving grace, are mostly just okay. The most remarkable thing about them would be the level of graphic violence on display – this film makes no compromises and sometimes feels more like a body horror than an action film – and I won’t deny there’s a certain amount of enjoyment to be had from the extremity of that in a genre that’s so often PG friendly.
But that’s maybe ten minutes or so of the film, and the rest is an utter chore. A lot of the action is filmed rather flatly, perhaps initially a welcome change from shakycam obsessed modernity but soon feels a bit stodgy, and the remainder of the film is a half dozen good ideas for fight/sequences sequences, a half dozen ideas for a nice visuals, with the rest of the film appearing to have been randomly generated from plot strands from other genres and stock photography of the world’s dullest warehouses.
In conclusion I award this “watch Mandy” out of ten.