If you've ever wanted to watch two hours of unspeakably horrible people doing unspeakably horrible violence against each other, have I got the movie for you!
I'd heard positive comparisons between The Night Comes For Us and martial arts all-timer The Raid – not least because the movies share their top-billed actors – but this was just deeply unpleasant in a way that The Raid never was.
A high-ranking Triad killer has an inexplicable (for him) change of heart, mowing down his fellow death-squad murderers to save a little girl from the massacre he'd just carried out; he runs to hide out with his Jakarta ghetto crew, which just draws a collection of increasingly strange assassins trying to kill him and the girl (who is little more than a macguffin).
The volume of fake blood on show here, and the rate at which it is sprayed across the sets, would be impressive if it didn't feel so perfunctory; it feels like a weird, even sociopathic, thing to say, but there's just no joy in what this film is doing.
The Raid was a desperate scramble for survival; every defeated enemy was a temporary victory for the protagonists. In this, the nameless thugs who get machete'd, shot, mutli-stabbed or clubbed with snooker balls to death in dutch angles are just meat for the grinder.
The "hero" isn't someone that I found it possible to root for. His change of heart, which sparks the events of the film, makes no sense with anything we learn about his character from the handful of flashbacks sprinkled through the film, and isn't reflected in the brutality he continues to dish out throughout the course of the movie.
The girl he saves is just barely given a name, in between hiding in the bathroom, or hiding in the back seat of a car, or hiding under a car, or hiding in another bathroom. There's a scene, which made me think of this meme, where the little girl comforts the man who slaughtered everyone she's ever known because he's sad that his cadre of low-grade drug-pushing friends (who he hadn't seen in three years and each of whom he beat up upon reuniting) were killed by another low-grade drug-pushing criminal who he'd deliberately pissed off.
(By "pissed off", I of course mean, "brutally murdered all of his employees".)
The rogues' gallery of assassins threatens, briefly, to be interesting until the two main ones turn out (of course) to be lesbians with a fetish for killing, each with their own inconveniently specific weapons which prove to be their ultimate downfall; another latecomer is just Ramona Flowers But She's Got A Gun.
But perhaps the worst thing about it is how little Iko Uwais gets to do. The final showdown between him and the film's protagonist in the closing minutes is the only part where he really gets into gear, and it's honestly thrilling to watch him just for the speed he can throw a punch. Like most of the fights, however, this one is dragged out to the point of exhaustion, and the opening momentum is completely gone by the time the combat collapses to the ground in a ludicrous puddle of fake blood.
Not really recommended.
