So a number of critics drew attention to this as a film to take note of but obviously to international audiences the real draw here is that it stars Iko Uwais who first shot to fame in Gareth Evans’ Merantau and The Raid. This one was written and directed by a different director, Timo Tjahjanto, and Uwais is actually a co-star here but if you come in expecting plenty of gory, visceral violence you won’t be disappointed.

After spending years working as an elite enforcer for the Triad, Ito has a sudden change of heart while massacring a village. He turns around and kills his fellow enforcers in order to save the last survivor, a little girl named Reina. Knowing that he is now a target himself he takes Reina back to his home turf in Jakarta. It turns out that he once ran his own small gang there but had to join the Triad when a member of his old gang dipped into the drugs business and offended them. His old gang members are still loyal to him and so help to defend Reina when the Triad’s enforcers come calling. Unfortunately when he left his old gang, another member of his gang, Arian, also left with him and is now also a senior enforcer with the Triad. Arian feels some affection for his old gang members but is also tempted by the riches that the Triad’s bosses offer him.

We don’t expect much from the story of an action film like this, but it’s even worse than usual. The basic premise isn’t too bad but the details and the execution are just awful. Ito’s heel-face turn is in no way believable and they never even bother explain why the Triad even bothers to go to such trouble to kill a single little girl. Partway through the story, a mysterious woman known only as the Operator shows up and becomes Ito’s ally. She explains that her mission to kill all of the elite enforcers of the Triad and we never find out why or who she works for. It’s made worse by the fanciful terms and names they use, such as the awkward Six Seas to denote the top six Triad enforcers. The characters variously speak in Indonesian, English, Mandarin and even French, probably in an effort to impress the audience of the international scale of the organization. It might be a nice touch but as usual for such efforts, some of the actors like Uwais himself speak Mandarin so badly that they shouldn’t have bothered. It’s bad storytelling and bad worldbuilding all the way down.

The moment to moment action choreography is still pretty great and I enjoyed how the different characters have different fighting styles. Ito for example is more of a brute while Arian is fast and precise. As before the extreme level of visceral physical damage brings back all of the shock and impact of violence that sanitized action films leave out. Unfortunately apart from that, all of the usual flaws are present. The characters take immense physical damage but somehow struggle on through sheer grit. The main characters are heavily outnumbered but the mooks considerately only approach them one or two at the time while the rest comically jostle for position. Guns are used as threats but are rather ineffective in this film and you need to dozens of impacts to do any real harm to the main characters. Characters with guns use them stupidly as well, standing right in front of car driving towards them for example and never bothering with cover. As with The Raid 2, the rule of cool is in full effect with the result being that it looks like ultra gory comic book violence that in no way resemble real fights.

I decided to give the Indonesian filmmakers another chance due to Iko Uwais’ strong showing in this early films and critics’ praise for this effort. But as with The Raid 2, this is them getting more budget to play around with and not getting that the earlier film worked so well precisely because of how minimalistic it was. Unless they substantially change things up, I’m not interested in this emerging genre any longer.