My Thoughts on “The Night Comes for Us”
At the height of its power…The South East Asian TRIAD controls 80% of Asia’s smuggling activities. Utilizing the notorious GOLDEN TRIANGLE as their main hub. The TRIAD profits heavily from the trade of illegal drugs, weapons, and human trafficking. To keep the channels free from chaos and outside disturbance, TRIAD leaders created a small formation of elite delegates…Allowing them free reign to employ ‘extreme measures.’ All in the name of order and obedience. These delegates are six men ♂︎ and women ♀︎…their identities are anonymous. They are known as the SIX SEAS.
Our main character, Ito (Joe Taslim) is a member of the Six Seas, and after that opening text giving us a basic rundown of the Triads and the Six Seas, we see the aftermath of a massacre that the Six Seas have just committed. They just showed up and seemingly massacred this whole village next to beach, more than likely a fishing village 🎣. Someone in that village pissed off the Triads, stole their drugs and tried to sell it to small-time dealers, and they sent the Six Seas to make an example of them. So, pretty much everyone in the village is dead, except for this one little girl ♀︎ ☝️, and she is another one of our main characters, Reina (Asha Kenyeri Bermudez). Ito goes in for the kill, points his gun at her, but at the last minute, he hesitates, and decides to spare her life, and turn his gun all of his fellow colleagues; killing them all the right where they stand. So, knowing that he had just killed all of the other Six Seas members present (or maybe they weren’t Six Seas, they were just random Triad soldiers who accompanied him to carry out this massacre with him), he takes Reina, and takes her back to his ex-girlfriend, Shinta’s apartment to hide her there for safety.
Shinta (Salvita Decorte) is not happy to see Ito, they have some history, their relationship ended badly, and they broke up (probably due to Ito’s life as a Triad enforcer), and she doesn’t like he came to her apartment unannounced, and brought this young girl ♀︎ there. But, she reluctantly agrees to look after Reina, while Ito puts together a team, gathers up all his former friends and associates, and reassembles his old gang to protect Reina, and fend off the Triads and anyone they send after her; and him because they want to kill him too because he betrayed them. He grew a conscious, and doesn’t want to be in the Triads anymore, doesn’t want to be a Six Seas anymore, he wants to walk and go straight, leave this life of crime behind him, and start over. That’s how it always is. And he really wants to protect this girl ♀︎ who he decided to spare, and that’s what the movie’s about.
It’s about this former Triad enforcer, this Six Seas member, who turns on his fellow enforcers and the Triads as a whole, and does everything he can protect this girl ♀︎, and prevent the Triads or the other Six Seas from getting to her and killing her. All so that him and her can assume new identities, and start a new life together, free from all this criminality and death. But, as most things involving international crime syndicates, this proves to a lot more difficult than he anticipated. And that’s with him being in the Triads for three years, he knows how they operate, he enforced out their will, and yet, he didn’t realize just how hard this was actually going to be: leaving the Triads, and protecting this girl ♀︎ long enough for the two of them to escape, and start a new life together. He really didn’t think this through anywhere near as well as he should. He loses everything. His ex leaves him for real this time, he asks to her take Reina with her to somewhere safe, but she tells him “no,” she doesn’t want to get involved, and she just tosses her phone 📱 into a nearby trash can 🗑️, and then boards a subway train 🚇, leaving the movie for good.
All of his friends die, everyone he brought into this, including Arian (Iko Uwais), who pretty much became his enemy, and his main rival or adversary throughout. Arian is the one who he fights at the end of the movie, the final fight is between them. He receives all sorts of injuries throughout, some of them life threatening and he probably should’ve died from but didn’t (I’ll talk about that more when I get into the action). And while his fate is ultimately left ambiguous, the movie cuts away and cuts to the end credits before we ever find what happens to ol’ Ito here. But judging by what was happening, the situation that he was in, and what he was doing, it’s pretty safe to assume that he’s dead. He doesn’t make it out of this alive. He turned on the Triads, to save a little girl ♀︎, and he paid the ultimate price for it. And to think, this all happens in one day. That’s why it’s called The Night Comes for Us, the whole movie takes place over the course of one day.
To be fair, he does manage to get the girl ♀︎ to safety in the end, but that’s only after he allies with the Operator (Julie Estelle), a mysterious silent character (a woman ♀︎ of few words) who shows up to kill Ito and the other Six Seas, just as all this shit is going down. We aren’t told anything about her character, or who she’s working for and why. We don’t know if she’s law enforcement, or a government agent, or an enforcer of a rival crime syndicate. My personal guess is that she’s either law enforcement or she’s a government agent of some kind, like a spy. The fact that she’s called the Operator is a pretty indicator that she’s probably not apart of the criminal world, but is working for some force outside of it. All we know is that she’s not working with the Triads, and she’s willing to help Ito protect Reina and get her to safety. She’s easily the most badass character in the whole movie, and is the smartest, she’s the most intelligent person in this whole movie, and she leaves as soon as she comes in. Like, after her job’s done, and gets Reina out of there, she’s out of the movie, and we never see her again. The Operator is the most intriguing character in the whole movie, mainly because of how little we actually know about her, and she’s the character that I wanted to see more after this was finished. If we don’t get a direct sequel to this movie, we could at least get a spinoff focused on the Operator.
I will say that after watching it again this time for this review, I do still really like this movie. It’s probably not something that I would watch all the time, it doesn’t quite reach the level of being a “comfort movie” for me, but it is still really good. It’s a pretty awesome action movie, and it does do a good job at showing Tjahjanto’s chops as a director, and you can see why Hollywood sought him out. This is the movie landed him the gigs to direct both Nobody 2 and The Beekeeper 2 🐝. He’s directed other people’s sequels, but hasn’t directed a sequel to his own movie; not even a spinoff about the best character, the Operator. if you’ve never seen it before and this is your first time hearing about it, I think you should go watch it. I think most of you reading this will enjoy it, if you can handle the blood 🩸 and gore. Which brings me to the best aspect of this movie, and the main thing people come to see, the action. It’s the thing that drew the most praise and the most criticism. Some people liked the action, they liked the choreography on the fights, but they didn’t like how bloody 🩸, and in some instances, gory it was. They said it was “too excessive.” But, as I said before, I never had a problem with the blood 🩸 or the gore in this movie, I thought it gave this movie a lot of personality, and set it apart from other action movies of this same type. And watching on this viewing, it still didn’t bother me, and I still liked it. In fact, after watching it again for this review, and paying much closer attention to the story, I think the blood 🩸 and gore do serve the story, and aren’t just there for spectacle or for shock value.
It shows just how violent the Triads are, and how violent this criminal world is, and much the peace is disturbed by their presence. The main villain of the film, Chien Wu (Sunny Pang) even tells Arian this, that the violence is the point. The Triads intentionally cause chaos everywhere they want to move into, so that they can more easily swoop in and take over, and rule over what’s left. And the movie makes it clear that these are awful people, and it goes out of its way to show you how horrible these people are, so that you won’t feel bad when they die, and in fact you’ll want to see them die, and die in horrible ways. And many of them. Every shitty person in this movie dies a horrible death. The only one who potentially gets away Scott free is Chien Wu, but again, his fate is left ambiguous. He either survived, and walked away from all this as the winner, or he died from Ito running him over with that car, taking him with him. And of course, the Operator survives, she came late into the game, and didn’t have much stake in it anyway, and Reina lives too. She escapes on a boat. Oh, and Shinta she lives too, she got out before things really got bad.
There are so many awesome fights in this movie, and just cool set pieces in this. My favorite ones by far are the prelude fight in the warehouse, when Ito kills all those Triad goons before he gets to Arian, and the fight between the Operator and the two Triad enforcers, Alma (Dian Sastrowardoyo) and Elena (Hannah Al Rashid). The movie does a good job at hating you hate Alma and Elena and want to see them get killed because they kill two of Ito’s friends, Bobby (Zack Lee), the crazy drug addict guy who’s very light complected (they keep referring to him as “white” throughout the film, like his whole nickname is “White Boy Bobby,” and to be far, the actor playing him is in fact of British descent 🇬🇧), and Wisnu (Dimas Anggara), who doesn’t get very many lines, who we don’t learn that much about, and is really just there to be cannon fodder. But, it’s not just that they kill them, it’s now confident and smug they all act about. Elena acts so calm and cool when she first shows up, and kills Bobby, she’s so cold about it, and acts like she’s the biggest badass in the room; and to be fair, she kind of was, she outclassed everyone in that hallway, including Bobby, who stood no chance, and even he knew that (he was just buying time for Fatih to escape with Reina). And of course, Alma takes pleasure from killing Wisnu, she really savors it, it’s like she’s getting a sick thrill out of this.
But, when they both come across the Operator in Shinta’s apartment, all that coolness, all that smoothness is gone. She saps all the cool out of them. Alma really went out like a bitch, like the Operator really made sure her death was especially painful. You see, Alma’s main weapon is a garrote wire (a razor wire with some balls attached at the end), and the Operator wraps around her knife it at one end, gets Alma tangled up in it, and then she wraps it onto a a nearby air conditioner installed in the apartment, and kicks it out of the windows, causing Alma to get pulled towards the wall and get strangled to death by her own razor wire; she also loses some fingers in the process because she tries to pull the wire off her, but it just cuts her fingers off because it’s so sharp. She really isn’t that much of a badass. We see her get her ass kicked twice, both times we see her. She gets her ass kicked by Arian, and then she gets her ass kicked and killed by the Operator. And her death was well deserved, you’ll cheer when she dies. Elena really loses her cool when the Operator kills Alma. She tries to play it off, like she doesn’t care, but she does. It’s very clear during this fight that she is angry at her 🤬 for killing Alma, she’s the one who’s yelling, and showing emotion during this fight.
The Operator’s the one that maintains her composure throughout, even after losing one of her pinky fingers. Elena acts all arrogant when that happens, like she thinks she really did something, until she looks down and sees that the Operator slashed her belly open, and her intestines are hanging. Then, she gets really pissed again 🤬, and lunges at her, but the Operator quickly overpowers her, breaks her arm, stabs that same arm that she broke, cuts into it, and then stabs her in the neck, finally killing her. It’s probably the most satisfying death in the whole movie, and part of the satisfaction comes from just seeing how badass the Operator truly is. Something that I picked up on this time around that I didn’t pick up on before, is that Alma and Elena are lovers ❤️. They’re both lesbians ⚢, and they’re a couple. When that one guy in the elevator called them “lesbian weirdos ⚢,” I didn’t think he meant that literally. I thought he was just calling them that because they’re two women ♀︎ together, and Elena has part of her head shaved. But no, they are actual lesbians ⚢, which is cool I guess. It does explain the overly emotional reaction that Elena has to Alma’s death. She wasn’t just a friend or a colleague, she was her lover ❤️.
I even liked some of the other fight scenes, like the first real fight scene inside of the butcher shop, when Ito goes to get his money 💵 back from Yohan (Revaldo), who used to be an associate of Ito’s, a former friend of his (Bobby refers to him as his “errand boy”), but now works for the Triads and runs his own little drug empire in Jakarta, using the butcher shop as his front. It’s a cool little scene, and it gives you a taste of what’s about to come. It is one of the most brutal fight scenes in the entire movie because it’s in a butcher shop, they have all these sharp tools and utensils, all these cleavers, meat hooks, and bone saws. People get really fucked up during this scene, and it’s glorious 😁. I even liked the fight scene in Fatih’s apartment, where him and Bobby take on all these Triad guys ♂︎ with knives, and it is brutal. You get to see just how savage and how crazy Bobby is, when he gets riled up, like you get the sense that he’s as much of a danger as the Triad guys ♂︎ that are after them. The others better watch out.
And Fatih (Abimana Aryasatya) is cool, I like Fatih. I wish he lasted a lot longer than he actually did. Him, Bobby, Wisnu get taken out pretty early on in the film, just as soon as the action really kicks in. And it’s not Alma or Elena who kills him, it’s these random Triad guys with guns. That is something that I noticed about this movie, on this most recent viewing. It’s not any of the enforcers that kill most of the main characters, it’s not the badass martial artists who get the job done, it’s the regular Triad foot soldiers. Everyone who dies in this movie, every major character is killed by getting shot by just regular Triad foot soldiers with guns. The only ones who aren’t are Bobby, Wisnu, Alma, and Elena. Everyone else dies from getting shot. Arian gets shot to death execution style, like they gun him down, loading all kinds of bullets into him, turning him to Swiss cheese. And Ito more than likely suffers the same fate too at the end, even if he manage to kill some of them by running them over with his car. So, this is one movie where the henchmen, the regular goons who aren’t named characters, aren’t completely ineffective.
I even liked that short action scene inside of the police transport truck, where Ito fights all those crooked cops working for the Triads, and kills all of them while still being handcuffed. I will say though that my enjoyment of these action scenes is largely due to the resounds that the YouTuber, Tony Jax did of them. He did a few resounds of a few of the fight scenes in here, and boy, those added sound effects really enhance these fights. Especially the warehouse fight scene, where Ito kills all the Triad guys like a one man army, Tony Jax’s resound of that scene really added to the intensity and the brutality of it. You can hear more of the bone crunching, the punches, the kicks, and the impacts sound more powerful, like when Ito kills that one guy by smashing his head in with the pool balls 🎱). The shotgun in that scene sounds louder and more powerful, it has more of a boom sound to it, and the shotgun part is probably my favorite part of that whole scene. It makes me wish that Tony Jax would do resounds on the other fight scenes, like the butcher shop fight scene, or the apartment fight scene with Fatih and Bobby, or the Operator, Alma, and Elena fight scene. But, if you want to see the resounds of the fight scenes that Tony Jax has done, I’ll put them down below at the end of this review.
The only aspect of the action that I didn’t like was the final fight between Ito and Arian. You’d think that would be the best fight in the movie considering that it’s the one the whole movie was building up to, and Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim are easily the most skilled martial artists in the entire cast, but it’s not, at least for me it isn’t. It’s cool at first, and there are some brutal hits, Ito and Arian get absolutely fucked up during this fight, but it goes on way too long. It’s so long in fact that when Tony Jax did the resound of it, he had to split it into four parts. It gets kind of ridiculous after awhile, because as I said, these guys ♂︎ take so much damage, they receive so many fatal injuries that you’re wondering, “how are these guys not dead yet?” Like, they should’ve already died from the halfway point just from blood loss 🩸 alone because they’re bleeding throughout this whole fight. By the end of it, they’re just completely covered in blood 🩸. Ito gets stabbed in the belly with a screwdriver 🪛, Arian and Ito cut each other up with some box cutters, and then Arian stabs Ito in the mouth with a box cutter, while Ito stabs him in the neck with a piece of wood that has a nail sticking out of it. And yet, despite all of that, they’re both still alive and kicking. Like, Arian just got stabbed in the throat, he’s bleeding out of his neck, how he is still alive?! How he is alive long enough to stand up, and try to shoot Ito as he walks away? And why does it take him getting shot several times by a literal shower of bullets to finally kill him? This is what I meant earlier when I said that Ito received several fatal injuries that should’ve killed him but didn’t.
Tony Jax’s multiple part resound of that fight is cool, it does enhance it a lot, especially with the music he added in, but even that isn’t enough to make me like this fight. I think the final fight in The Raid 2 is a lot better than the final fight in this movie, because it’s a lot shorter and it actually has a conclusive end with one of the two combatants dying. This fight is not only long, but it ends inconclusively, with neither one of them dying, at least as a result of the fight. They don’t kill each other, the fight just stops, and Ito just gives up and walks away. It gives the sense that neither one of them actually wanted to kill each other, despite how much they injured each other, and it makes the whole fight seem pointless. Like, these two didn’t need to fight each other, it doesn’t really serve the plot, and it resolves nothing. Ito doesn’t kill Arian in the end, a bunch of random Triad foot soldiers do; or I guess they are enforcers too, but they don’t have names, and they aren’t martial artists, they’re just people with guns.
It’s just there to be there, because Tjahjanto felt like the movie needed a final fight, one more piece of spectacle so that the audience can have a grand finale, and the movie can have more of a climax, even it doesn’t actually resolve anything, and everything that it could’ve resolved, gets resolved after the fight. I think if they had that made this fight a lot shorter, if they ended it sooner, if they had an actual winner with one of the opponents actually killing the other, or at least had one of them die from their injuries. As it is, it is kind of a letdown of a final fight. It starts out strong, but goes on so long that it becomes tiresome, and you’re just waiting for it to end 😑, and it just fizzles out at the end, and you’re like, “Wow, you guys ♂︎ really didn’t have to fight at all. In fact, you both would’ve been better off if you didn’t fight. You didn’t have the courtesy to end the fight with one of you killing the other. This whole thing was just pointless. It didn’t need to happen, and you’re both worse off because it happened.”
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