The Night Comes For Us (Timo Tjahjanto, Indonesia, 2018)

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An ultra-violent, slick, non-stop action-fest distributed by Netflix, The Night Comes For Us is another of the streaming company’s 2018 triumphs, and another jewel in the Crown of Indonesia’s Brand of brutal, kinetic and brilliantly choreographed action films. Directed by Timo Tjahjanto (Headshot) and starring three alumni of The Raid duology, Joe Taslim, Iko Uwais and Julie Estelle is a gore-tastic treat for action fans.

In the seas of Southeast Asia, the Triads enforce their ruthless grip over the illegal businesses (drug-dealing, gun-running, human-trafficking and other such enterprises) by sending six delegates to make sure things run smoothly in all the countries where the Triads have a hand in. Known as the Six Seas, these enforcers go as far as murdering entire villages if the locals are caught stealing from the Triads supplies. Jakarta gangster, Ito (Joe Taslim) is one of the Six Seas and very effective on his job, until one day he snaps. Facing down a little girl called Reina (Asha Kenyeri Bermudez), the sole survivor of the most recent victim of his purges, Ito decides to spare her and gun down his own men. On the run after his betrayal, he returns to Jakarta and with the help of his former best friend Fatih (Abimana Aryasatya) and fellow associates (including Zack Lee as the memorable “White Boy” Bobby) tries to get new passports and money to start a new life far away from the Triad’s reach. However, fellow Six Seas Chien Wu (Sunny Pang) sends his own army after Ito and Reina, and personally commands Ito’s ambitious former friend and up-and-coming enforcer, Arian (Iko Uwais), to liquidate the traitor.

What follows is setpiece after setpiece of bone-crushing, throat slicing, disemboweling, head smashing action, as Ito and company fight back against Chien Wu’s seemingly endless supply of blade-wielding mooks. Besides these disposable tin soldiers, Chien Wu has under his employ a pair of psycho lesbians, Alma (Dian Sastrowardoyo, with a bob haircut, Mia Wallace outfit, Anime villain contempt for inferiors and a razor-wire lasso) and Helena (Hannah Al Rashid, Caucasian with Viking-style long hair shaved on one side and a fondness for Kukri knives), who are among the most terrifying badasses you have seen. Complicating matters is the appearance of the also incredibly badass Operator (Julie Estelle), a bike riding lady with a spy catsuit and a leather jacket who also makes mincemeat out of a couple people and whose motives are completely different from those of Chien Wu’s.

Picking a favorite action scene in this film is quite difficult, for there are a ton of them. Personally, I quite enjoyed the onslaught on Fatih’s apartment before the halfway mark, and the badass fighting between the ladies. Joe Taslim is a force of nature here, bleeding copious amounts of blood while also serving some unbelievable destruction in a very mean manner. He goes toe to toe with Uwais, who gets to play a (conflicted) antagonist. The neon-noir backdrop in both Macau nightclubs and Jakarta’s docks plants this film aesthetically within the range of the Raid movies and Johnnie To’s brilliant films like Fuk Sau and Drug War, so needless to say that the photography and set design are gorgeous. The use of props is also terrific: if you see it on screen, it can be used as a weapon, even the net for the pool table. Fair warning to those accustomed to traditional, modern-day Western action cinema: this is an extremely gory movie that I do not recommend watching while eating anything. Every creative way of slicing and hacking in every part of the body is demonstrated here and with thorough realism.

The Night Comes For Us is an over-the-top heroic bloodshed film in which plotting, motivation and the distinction between the good guys and bad guys are defined by a very thin line: the good guys want to save a little girl, the bad guys want to kill her. Other than that, both sides are involved in awful criminal activity and have no problem slaughtering people in brutal ways in the midst of combat. Throw your silly expectations of realism and fully embrace the pulverizing, blood-drenched, yet very stylish and graceful power of Indonesian action.

P.S. It was released on my birthday. How cool is that?

Nemesis (Albert Pyun, Denmark-USA, 1993)

 

When I first saw this film’s poster I thought to myself “I needed to watch this movie like yesterday.” It took me more time to get around to it, and by that time I had seen the trailer and became aware that it was directed by that B-movie genre maestro Albert Pyun. I confess that I have only seen Pyun’s “Captain America” when I was so much younger than today, but I had read enough about his reputatio: directing an unholy amount of films per year, a lot of story and technical ambition and a sensibility that skews towards cyborgs and sword and sorcery. So, my kind of guy. Reading bits and pieces about “Nemesis” (released in Japan in 92 and in the rest of the world in 93) I discovered that the film’s visual effects supervisor was Gene Warren Jr., who was also the visual effects for “Terminator 2”, a heavy influence on this movie. These reviewers said that the effects felt really short compared to T2, but I don’t see them as detrimental to the film as they do (I’ll get back to that in the end of this review). However, the convoluted storyline and confusing character motivations do a bit of damage, overpowering what I felt was a cracking shoot-em-up with some awesome stylish elements.

The film is set in Los Angeles, 2027. It is a cyberpunk hellscape, with enhanced humans, people who use their bodies to smuggle data and very human looking and behaving androids. Cyborgs also exist, including our film’s morally ambiguous protagonist, Alex Raine (Olivier Gruner) an LAPD agent/assassin who is really good at his job. He is introduced in the middle of a violent standoff with members of a terrorist group called The Red Army Hammerheads. He is more machine than man now, as pointed out by the leader of the cell of Hammerheads he mostly succeeds in killing, before she shoots him down. Repaired and reconstructed, Raine later leaves the service and tries his hand in the black market in Brazil, only to be captured and compelled into service for the LAPD (which has way too much power and jurisdiction here) once more by his old superior, commissioner Farnsworth (Tim Thomerson) who plants a time bomb in Raine’s heart to convince him. Raine has to track down the leadership of the Hammerheads and his former superior/lover, Jared, an android, who has smuggled some data about the security of a meeting between the United States and Japan, who are planning on merging into a single country. But once Alex is in Java, he uncovers more twists and turns.

The plot, like I said, is ridiculously complicated and the film shifts character motivations at the drop of a hat. What’s worse, named characters are introduced and killed or dropped in a flash (including the hero’s dog, which seemed to be more important at first). There are also some really odd choices, like having a white female character speak in pidgin Japanese with no discernible reason or textual justification. The script definitely needed some paring down, because following these people around is a bit frustrating. It is obvious that the film is bursting with some great ideas such as the nature of humanity, the effects and possibilities of trans-humanism, duty, etc. On the flip side, I greatly enjoyed the atmospheric, golden-hour look of the film and the image of badasses in suits and ties (and even a mini-dress!) and hi-tech sunglasses firing Desert Eagle pistols (and similar heavy and futuristic variants), shotguns, machine guns, rocket launchers and so forth. This is a futuristic Heroic Bloodshed film and the choreography is great and it has some delightful over-the-top moments: two bad guys shoot through a wall by drawing silhouettes with their machine guns, something I’ve only seen in cartoons; Alex does the “shoot the floor” trick to get away from some baddies a whopping five or six times in a row (we watch him go down while he keeps firing through every floor). The bullets never run out. There’s every combination of weaponry, martial arts and kickassery imaginable. And the women are all jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The actresses include Marjorie Monaghan, Deborah Shelton, Jennifer Gatti, Merle Kennedy and Blair Valk, most of them regulars of 90’s Star Trek TV Shows. The supporting cast includes Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Brion James (doing a bonkers German accent), Yuji Okumoto and brief appearances from Sven Ole-Thorsen, Thomas Jane and Jackie Earle Haley.

The visual effects are pretty good for a film of a lower budget than Hollywood (it was produced by Imperial Entertainment, but it had been on Pyun’s head since working for Cannon in the mid-80’s, although in different versions than this one) and the final confrontation with an exoskeleton is pretty well done. Actually, I find it even more commendable, considering the budget. There are a lot of splendid set pieces that involve an insane amount of explosions (everything explodes when fired at in this movie, kind of like in 90s videogames) and even an industrial chimney falls down and almost crushes our heroes. Pyun is also good at staging conversation scenes in a manner that you don’t even see nowadays, with some really nice tracking shots throughout. There’s also body horror galore (cybernetic eyes and pulled out to be inspected) and lots of gore: cyborgs and androids, when they get shot, turn into awful messes, and we see disembodied torsos and faces torn apart, half muscle, half metal, and really bloody. The film takes a lot of elements from a wide variety of movies like “Robocop”, T2, “Blade Runner” and “Escape From New York”, and it mostly works, although I think Pyun got confused because the terms cyborgs and androids are used interchangeably (that is to say, androids, which are robots with human skin and blood, are called cyborgs, which gets confusing, especially because they are also capable of sexual activity). Another fascinating aspect of the film: male characters have traditionally female names (Michelle, Angie, Marion) and female characters have traditional male names (Jared, Max, Julian).

All and all, a film that, despite some frustrating aspects, is a lot of fun to watch, and at its thrilling speed you don’t even feel the time go by. For fans of cyberpunk, heroic bloodshed, corporate/political warfare, retro-futuristic fashion and the human form. Recently released on Blu-Ray by MVD Visual, which includes 3 different cuts. Also, the poster really is a gorgeous piece of work that I want on my wall.

RoboCop At 30: Fragmented Memories

Early childhood memories are fleeting specters. They appear in fragments and single images, and during adulthood we begin to question whether these memories are real or fabrications of the mind, a mishmash of different scenes and snippets from different years. 

Without doubting myself, I can recall a few memories from the first two or three years of my life. I remember sleeping in a cot between my parents, behind the grocery store that the newlyweds were beginning to run. We didn’t have a home until much later, but I still remember the darkness around us, the tight space that I had between mother and father, the piece of tarp that divided our living quarters from the store and its rows of iron shelves. That, I believe, is my earliest memory.

But there is another memory from that early age. I must’ve been three or four years old when I watched RoboCop for the first time.

A man is surrounded by other men. Bad men. He is on the ground, looking helpless, as they make fun of him. Then the boss…a bad guy with glasses…shoots him with a shotgun. His right hands is blown apart, a sea of blood springs forth from the stump. The man stands and screams in pain as he tries to walk away, holding his wounded arm, half crouching. The bad men keep laughing at him and then they start shooting with their shotguns. Despite the barrage of bullets that sink into his body, the man doesn’t fall to the ground or die. Rather, he stands up screaming in pain. It is a terrible sound. Smoke fills the screen, and the camera pans as the murderers keep firing with glee in their faces. Finally, they stop. The man with glasses takes out a pistol and shoots the man in the face. Blood and brains blast out of the back of the head. His eyes stare emptily into space. The finality of death.

I gape in horror, and most of the scene I cover my eyes either with my hands or a blanket. This is pure horror.

But I keep on watching. After it’s over, I take the tape from the VCR and I place it on the rewind machine. With time, I learn to measure the length of the tape on each side of the VHS, so I can tell where my favorite part starts. For 20 years I skip more than half of the movie. The murder of Alex Murphy terrified me so much and I couldn’t bear to witness it again. It feels like a bad nightmare.

But the scene where RoboCop busts through a factory and mows down an army of bad guys, who pirouette and fall down with balletic grace, and sends his own murderer crashing through several glass panels? I know it by heart because I rewound it several times in a row.

At such an early age, it was inevitable that the film’s astonishing images would sear themselves into my own memory. I don’t remember watching the film…that is, I don’t see myself looking at our television. Rather, the scenes became the memories themselves, playing off in my head as if I had stepped into the movie’s universe and had become a fascinated, sometimes horrified, witness of the happenings in Old Detroit. 

I didn’t really understand the story. For one, the characters spoke a language that’s foreign to me. On the other hand, so many concepts evaded me. Years will pass before I understand things like resurrection, cybernetics, robotics, corporations, drug trafficking, law enforcement and even everyday aspects of modern life, like clubbing or house hunting. And yet, this movie holds sway over me. I’m fascinated by every shot, every second. I don’t understand the details, but I understand the story. I understand that the man that was brutally killed is a hero and that he doesn’t die, even though he should’ve, after being hurt so badly (I do not understand death fully, or ballistics, but the kind of body damage that is inflicted in this movie is so brutal that it gets to point across to those who have blessed with ignorance of extreme violence in real life) he is built by other people as a robot.

RoboCop himself is such a sight to behold, and he keeps me glued to the screen. He drives in a car around a city that doesn’t look anything like my town. The buildings are gigantic and their shapes look like something out of this world. There are so many cars, and the streets and roads are so labyrinthine. It was a glimpse into that wondrous land known as the United States.

I recall the characters. RoboCop's friend and partner, Lewis; corrupt executive Dick Jones; tough as nails Sgt. Reed; Clarence Boddicker and his gang of killers, so delightfully contemptible (seeing Emil Antonowsky turn into a melting man that gets splattered by Clarence's car is another scene that I replay constantly) and dozens of others. One of RoboCop's greatest strengths is its cast of oddball, yet real characters, and the brilliant casting of the actors who give them life.

The humanity and melancholy that permeates throughout the film is an essential part of the film. For all the talk of violence, fascism and dehumanization, RoboCop has a beating heart that is best depicted during the touching scene where our hero walks through the abandoned suburb house that used to be his home, remembering snippets of a happiness lost forever. Basil Poledouris's brilliant score shines through.

Another of the elements that I enjoy the most as an adult is the meta-fictional components: the media breaks, gaudy commercials, the weird-looking Bixby Snyder's ridiculous tv show that makes everyone laugh in a pavlovian response to the catchphrase "I'll buy that for a dollar!" When I was a kid, I didn't understand these scenes. They seemed to be unrelated to the rest of the movie. Now that I understand their purpose, I chuckle in a similar manner to "unemployed person" Keva Rosenberg, who chortles the film's thesis during an interview segment:  "It's a free society - except there ain't nothin' free, because there's no guarantees, you know? You're on your own. It's the law of the jungle. Hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo!"

 I must’ve been two or three years old, and I was already living in a house. It was a house built on the back of the building of the second grocery store that my parents had secured. We were living in Sonoyta, a border town in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. A wispy line drawn by cartographers separated us from Arizona. Tucson was only two and a half hours away. This was my father’s hometown, and this is where I spent my childhood. I enjoyed running around our generous backyard, for the lot upon the house-store was built had previously been the place of a mechanic shop. Two pits on the left side of the yard served as remnants of the lot’s previous existence. But if there was something more fun than gazing down the tremendous abyss of these pits (under the supervision of my parents or my mother’s young siblings who lived with us) it was watching television. During many years after my birth on October 19^th, 1987, our TV’s channel reception only received two channels. Cartoons were scarce. I had to content myself with seeing grown-up movies or talking heads reading the news.

My parents regularly went on trips across the border to buy merchandise. Understanding my need for entertainment and the opportunity to get familiarized with the English language, my parents bought one or two VHSs every trip. Always. By the time I was eight, I had an enviable collection of videocassettes, mostly Disney and Don Bluth movies. But one of the first videos (if not the first) that my father brought home was unlike any of these gentle, vivid, animated stories for the whole family.

It’s funny, because my parents were not careless people nor did they care much for action films. My mother can’t stand them, and my father gets as emotionally upset, if not more so, by tragic or harsh scenes on film. But somehow, RoboCop passed below the radar. I guess my dad thought it was going to be a cartoon-like spectacle (something that movie executives believed eventually) and since he was unfamiliar with MPAA ratings, he bought the movie for me, thinking I would love it.

He was right.

Not only that, but we watched it together several times. Barring the scene where corporate hotshot Bob Morton snorts cocaine in the company of two escorts, there was nothing objectionable to the film, outside of the violence. But movie violence has a distancing effect that sex lacks. And movie violence like the one depicted in RoboCop, outside of the gruesome murder of Murphy, become an essential part of the film’s fabric, like the set design. 

He bought me the NES game (unbeatable), a tape of the cartoon show and an action figure of RoboCop whose helmet I ended up losing twice: once down the shower drain (I took it everywhere) and once under the heels of a group of soldiers standing at attention during a speech given by then president Salinas de Gortari at the Zocalo square, during a visit to Mexico City. If Dick Jones engendered a distrust of men in suits, this tragedy confirmed to me that they were up to no good.

To this day we talk about it. Like me, his favorite thing is Clarence Boddicker and Kurtwood’s Smith brilliant performance. He says he felt like beating the hell out of him, the mark of a true villain. He says I always looked forward to the scene where RoboCop drives his USB spike into Boddicker’s throat.

RoboCop…bonding people together since 1987.

To be continued (and developed)...