If the past terrible year has given people one positive thing, it’s a lot more time to stream media content. Netflix subscribers have spent the last few months discovering all the hidden gems they missed out on when the world was up and running and there was less binge-watching time on their hands. One such hidden gem is Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us, one of the most intense action movies of the decade and a must-see for fans of the genre. This visceral 2018 actioner belongs in the same league as modern classics like John Wick and The Raid, but it doesn’t receive nearly as much love.
Recent actioners like Mad Max: Fury Road and Dredd haven’t let dialogue scenes get in the way of the action. They’re essentially feature-length action sequences; they let the spectacle of brutality drive the story forward instead of taking intermittent breathers between action sequences to get some exposition out of the way (and bore audiences). The Night Comes for Us falls into this category. It opens with the slaughter of an entire village by the South East Asian Triad in retaliation for some stolen drugs and only gets more intense from there.
When an infamous enforcer named Ito finds a little girl named Reina who has survived the attack, he makes the snap decision to wipe out the other Triad soldiers on the scene and takes the kid to his ex-girlfriend’s apartment to get her patched up and figure out how he’ll find her a new home. Having turned on the Triad, it quickly sets in that Ito is in way over his head. He calls in a couple of friends from the gang world, but most of them are loyal to the Triad. The full force of Indonesia’s ganglands and the corrupt cops on their payroll are all out to kill both Ito and Reina. From there, The Night Comes for Us is a nonstop ride in which a group of underdogs defies the odds to fight off a hundreds-strong army of hired goons.
An all-action movie can feel empty and devoid of substance, like the icing is there without the cake, but in The Night Comes for Us, the action is where the substance comes from. An entire criminal underworld is trying to kill a child and a handful of plucky martial artists are trying to protect her. None of the fight scenes are just fight scenes, because a little girl’s life is at stake. The movie crosses lines viewers don’t think it’ll cross. As brutal as it gets, it doesn’t seem like the movie will go as far as forcing Reina to get in on the grisly killings. And then, lo and behold, as an assassin is crawling through the rear window of a crashed car to kill her and her protectors are preoccupied fending off other armed assailants, Reina takes up a blade and – with a priceless childlike innocence – repeatedly stabs the guy in the face until he goes away.
The Night Comes for Us is one of the martial arts movies that benefits from having master martial artists in its cast, so the fight choreography is on point, performed realistically (not like a bunch of actors trying to remember their marks), and the editor was able to feature each action scene in all its glory because he wasn’t required to cut around stunt doubles. The cast includes the great Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim from The Raid. Any fan of The Raid franchise who laments the fact that there was never a third Raid movie should check out The Night Comes for Us. It’s not The Raid 3, but it is The Raid 3 in spirit.
Tjahjanto’s movie fits neatly into a new subgenre that has arisen in action cinema in recent years, characterized by gruesome, uncompromising depictions of violence that sometimes border on the horrific. The bone-crunching fist fights of Brawl in Cell Block 99 and blood-drenched knife fights of The Raid 2 are prime examples of this. With a handful of gnarly action beats that are difficult to watch, The Night Comes for Us is a challenging movie for even the most desensitized viewers.
The problem with a lot of action movies is that the stakes don’t feel real. The heroes’ lives aren’t in danger, because they seem to be invincible, weathering gunshot wounds without the slightest impairment to their physicality. In The Night Comes for Us, the stakes feel startlingly real. The characters manage to keep fighting through broken bones and stab wounds for a while before going down, but each new injury seriously debilitates them. The violence is cartoonish, but the pain is real. Throughout The Night Comes for Us, as legions of henchmen slice and dice their way through the thinning band of heroes protecting Reina, it seems horrifyingly possible – likely, even – that the bad guys are going to capture this girl eventually. This isn’t just a mindless action movie; it’s an edge-of-your-seat thrill-ride.
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