The Night Comes For Us is what you get when you mix John Wick with The Evil Dead
What is the best action film of the twenty-first century so far? There are few acceptable suggestions – John Wick, Mad Max: Fury Road, Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation – but there is only one correct answer: 2011’s The Raid.
The Indonesian movie – directed by Welshman Gareth Evans – introduced the world to a bona fide new action star in martial artist Iko Uwais. By stripping the action movie fourmula down to its barest essentials – there’s a building full of bad dudes and our heroes have to fight their way to the top – it allowed Uwais to just look like an absolute killer in some of the most wince-inducingly brutal fight scenes in recent movie history.
It was followed up with 2014’s The Raid 2, but the sequel unwisely ditched the original’s simplicity for a sprawling Godfather-style crime saga. The fights were still great, but the immediacy was lost. Since then, Iwais has become an established action star, even starring alongside Mark Wahlberg in Mile 22 and having a small part in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
But The Night Comes For Us, his latest film made in his native Indonesia, which hit Netflix this week, might even top The Raid – in terms of violence at least.
Uwais is the bad guy this time, with his The Raid co-star Joe Taslim taking the lead. Taslim plays Ito, an elite Triad enforcer who, in the way people in this films tend to, has a sudden inexplicable change of heart and saves a small girl from being slaughtered for no real clear reason. He goes on the run, and enlists the help of his old gang to keep her safe – only one of them, Arian (Uwais) is now deep within the Triads, and is sent to get Ito and the girl.
In truth, the set-up is a little convoluted, and there’s some confusing John Wick style stuff about secret assassin societies that doesn’t quite make sense. But while it might not quite match The Raid’s simplicity, it easily, easily makes up for it in the gore and violence department.
It is directed by Gareth Evans’ frequent collaborator, Timo Tjahjanto, who is also known as a horror director (he co-directed the incredible cult sequence in V/H/S/2 with Evans), and damn, does it show. It’s hard to think of another action movie that features this level of blood and splatter. This is Evil Dead level of gore, something you don’t normally see in straight up martial arts films. If you are used to the sanitised bloodless action of Hollywood filmmaking, where one punch or one bullet will fall a henchman, prepare for a shock.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEhPwthZWpg
This is a film where instead of getting stabbed once, characters are subjected to multiple, repeated machete hacks and slashes, – and end up with the wounds to show for it. And even then, they won’t go down, instead of having limbs broken and hacked off until they physically can’t go on. Intestines are spilled, flesh is melted and blood sprays up like geysers.
Trust me, this film is fucking ridiculous.
Holy shit, The Night Comes For Us is fucking incredible. 40% of the blood I’ve seen in my life was from this movie. It does for violence what the printing press did for the written word. It’s the Citizen Kane of punching a guy in the throat and then snapping his arm movies.
— Kevin Seccia (@kevinseccia) October 26, 2018
It will not be a film for everyone. This is a movie filled with long, grueling fight scenes that are paced like a marathon, not a sprint. There is a solid 40 minute stretch early on which piles on about three or four different set-pieces one after another, starting with Ito tearing up a butchers shop, and ending with a car chase through a multistory parking lot, via a close quarters showdown in back of a police van and a very bloody apartment fight.
The final confrontation between Ito and Arian is littered with drawing pins, lead pipes, Stanley knives, and circular saws.
If you are the sort of person who finds endless fighting in movies boring, may give it a miss. But if you are a proper martial arts movie obsessive, who used to hunt out imported DVDs of Jet Li movies, and if the names Donnie Yen or Tony Jaa mean anything to you, you will absolutely love it.
In a way, it is a shame that Netflix have picked it up. It is a film to be seen with a rowdy crowd of genre fans in a cinema, audibly gasping and wincing along. But grab a few mates – not the cynical ones, the ones who ‘get’ this stuff – watch it on a big TV, with the sound turned up loud, and you will have a blast.
