Timo Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes For Us has been one of Netflix’s few highly revered films. Tjahjanto exploded onto the streaming circuit with a bruising, pulsing, blood gushing actioner with The Raid stars Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim exchanging blows with Indonesia’s violent Triad crime family. The action has been the foundational point of praise for Tjahjanto’s utterly ruthless, bloody, gory, and borderline horrific destruction of the human body through his action. In just about every regard, the praise nails the brilliance of the action. A coordinated spectacle with intense clarity and intricately designed innovation that turns every set and prop into a meat grinder for us to sink our teeth into. Tjahjanto wows with a mobile camera, confidence in his stars, and enough variation to make each beat feel more distinct than the last. Unless you don’t have the guts for it, the action is easy to appreciate, as Tjahjanto is in total control of his craft. And from my understanding, an evolutionary step forward from what he established in Headshot (2016).
Here is where I step aside from the praise I (mostly) agree with.
In a vacuum, I love the action. The physicality is undeniable, the speed is remarkable, and the sheer volume of the utilized space scratches a nasty itch that few contemporary actioners fail to graze. My biggest hangup with Tjahjanto’s action is that it doesn’t really match the narrative scope. What I mean is that the action often feels like an exercise more than an entire workout. We’re not here for the narrative, I get that, but I am still a firm believer that the place of an action scene within a film should execute a form of meaningful clarity that expands the narrative’s muscles. Action is easy to appreciate when removed from the constructs of a film, but the perspective and purpose is still vital to articulating the proper emotional intensity a scene deserves.
I can describe my biggest problem with the film by simply looking at the action through the lack of perspective. The movement, the coordination, the gore, is impressive, but most of the scenes feel as if they are in service of the camera more than the story. That’s not to say every action scene is built that way, but the middle-most portion of the film up until the final duel between Uwais and Taslim are formally unclear. There’s a beat where Hannah Al Rashid’s character is introduced in an Oldboy-esque tracking shot. A fitting homage to a brilliant scene, but it doesn’t make any sense for the scene to be shaped that way. Especially after a scene in which Zack Lee and Abimama Aryasatya are white-knuckle brawling and bleeding in a room with a bunch of Triad fodder. The camera sizzles and soars, stuns and surprises, but again, this is for the camera more than it is anything else. I have a problem with that when Tjahjanto hasn’t established enough character to determine those movements.
I think of Leigh Whannell’s Upgrade (also released in 2018) as a film that gives his formal developments reasons for existing as they do. Upgrade is a fine film, but as the main character is installed with artificial intelligence, the camera becomes over-calculated and remarkably technical. Whannell gives reason for this stylistic choice and the film takes shape around that very idea. We see that idea evolve and develop throughout the movie, and suddenly, those choices help create a more fulfilling image of the themes Whannell is exploring. Tjahjanto seems to take on a tongue-in-cheek tone the more progressively outrageous the sequences get, but this neither reinforces an idea, or offsets a tonal precedent. This tends to happen when the camera is absorbed by its own lens, rather than infusing the camera with a perspective that propels the narrative through sequential beats.
Throughout the movie I continued to recall Tarantino’s bloody-pulp masterpiece Kill Bill. The Night Comes For Us has faint similarities to a group of gang-affiliated henchmen the protagonist has to pass through before they reach the final confrontation. In some ways, The Night Comes For Us makes it a point to introduce some neat characters that broaden the peripherals of the world, but this is manufactured by a quasi-episodic integration of baddies that are plopped into the story to shake things up. It’s already clear that Tjahjanto isn’t interested in the organic developments of a narrative, but these choices repeatedly diminish the value of his setpieces.
I mentioned Kill Bill because Tarantino also indulges himself (perhaps more than some would like), but he illustrates a narrative that gives way for the characters to appear when they do. It helps when the protagonist is actively searching for them, whereas the protagonist here is trapped in a whirlwind of maniacal revenge, but we aren’t afforded the luxury of visualizing the relationship of the main character with the world. Instead, Tjahjanto connects the remaining tissue leftover from the action with pace-stopping exposition that insists there is more at play here than there really is. The script repeatedly forces conflict into a story although it hasn’t earned their presence. We’re expected to accept this because a characters’ sudden appearance is the launching pad for another action sequence, but as that beat concludes, we run onto a treadmill that exhausts with verbalizing a world the characters hardly feel like they live in.
Timo Tjahjanto’s action is a remarkable feat removed from the constructs of a film. That’s not to say there isn’t room for this style of storytelling, but there are many examples throughout the years that indulge in the tenacity of gory violence without sacrificing the deliberate sequences that define a cinematic canvas. This feeling isn’t exclusive to The Night Comes For Us either. It just so happens to be an example of a mixed bag that excels in one department at the cost of many others. It is by no means a bad film, nor the most egregious example, but it is one that properly exemplifies a current era of action films that believe good action will carry a movie forward without question.
All this being said, I’m even more interested in exploring Tjahjanto’s filmography to figure if this is a gateway into a style I have yet to appreciate. What I see here in my preparation for his upcoming film, The Shadow Strays, is the potential for delivering some of the greater action of this generation if he could fasten his camera to a perspective that reinforces his meaning. You can only get so much out of a movie when it is in service of the camera rather than what is necessary to create a fulfilling picture.
Comentários