We truly are in a golden age of action cinema. From every corner of the globe, with budgets high, low, and in-between, remarkably fit men and women are beating the hell out of each other in that universal cinematic language: bang-bang, punch-kick, stab. Things seemed dark there for a time, when the 2000s posited incoherent editing as a way to hide the fact that Hollywood performers weren’t competent physical actors. There were a few bright spots in that decade where the old virtues of action cinema were still valued: the angular compositions of Johnnie To in Hong Kong, the breathtaking acrobatics of Tony Jaa over in Thailand, Donnie Yen’s increasingly self-important yet satisfyingly brutal collaborations with Wilson Yip. But the last decade or so has seen a growing recognition of the skills and abilities of stunt performers, with a new generation of directors and choreographers willing to put those abilities to their own deranged purposes. We’ve got the likes of Jesse V. Johnson and Scott Adkins continuing to churn out crunchy direct-to-video thrillers; Yugo Sakamoto and Kensuke Sonomura reinventing the Japanese genre film with slacker wit; Soi Cheang and Dante Lam carrying the torch for the Hong Kong cinema of the past, Cheang lamenting its falling while Lam sells it out for the big-budget propaganda aims of the PRC. Meanwhile, a straight-to-video culture is emerging in Mainland Chinese action films led by Qin Pingfei and Yang Bingjia (the Fight Against Evil and Eye for an Eye films); in Vietnam Veronica Ngo and Le Van Kiet are building on the groundwork laid by Johnny Tri Nguyen and his brother in the 2000s; and in Indonesia, action/horror director Timo Tjahjanto is building on the breakout success of that country’s The Raid movies (directed by a Welshman who discovered star Iko Uwais while making a documentary about Indonesian martial arts) with a couple of thrillingly gory genre mashups produced under the auspices of Netflix.
Tjahjanto’s The Night Comes for Us was a streaming hit (if such a thing can exist) back in 2018. Conceived as an homage to classic Hong Kong gangster movies, the film’s streamlined plot — it all takes place in one day as a reformed killer is hunted down by his former colleagues after he suddenly grows a conscience — left plenty of room for tons of ingenious bodily cruelty and extremely bloody violence. While the film’s emphasis was (rightly) on the action scenes, Tjahjanto was clearly interested in the margins of world-building, creating an elaborate international Triad organization whose illicit aims are enforced by a sextet of assassins called Six Seas. Why Six and not Seven? Who knows, but one would bet there’s a backstory there and that Tjahjanto was more interested in filling it out than in the familiar and underdramatized moral dilemmas of his ostensible two leads (as far as their dynamic goes, he was clearly more interested in the Bloodshed than the Heroic).
Halfway through The Night Comes for Us, we’re introduced to a female assassin known only as The Operator who has been tasked by her superiors (we never find out who they are) with killing all the Six Seas. She doesn’t get any of them, but instead has a bunch of incredible fights including showdowns with two other women assassins, who we learn are, in addition to working for the Triad, members of another ranked group of killers called the Lotus. That’s about all we learn about these women, but in the years since 2018, Tjahjanto had been rumored to be working on a spin-off/sequel to The Night Comes for Us centered on The Operator. It’s not clear, but it’s also not hard to suspect that project may have morphed into The Shadow Strays, which is focused on just such an organization of clandestine assassins-for-hire.
Like the earlier film, Tjahjanto’s latest is a maximalist action flick packed with incredibly creative ways of maiming, dismembering, and annihilating human bodies. Ostensibly a Girls with Guns movie, in that its two main characters are women, it also features Men with Guns, Girls with Katanas, a Giant Russian who crushes people’s heads with his bare hands, a shadowy mustachioed boss who is very disappointed in their killers (a holdover from the previous film), and a villain trio comprised of a Pimp and his psychotic Twin Sister, a Corrupt Cop, and the deranged Rich Failson of a Scheming Politician. That trio probably says something about Tjahjanto’s view of contemporary Indonesian politics, but someone more versed in such nuances would be better at explicating that. Instead, what this writer can tell you is that this movie has yakuza and geisha, grenades filled with nails, masks (several varieties) and ninja armor, and a vast array of conventional and improvised weaponry: guns, swords, knives, machetes, motorcycles, a memo spike, batons, a gas stove, a wok, a baseball bat, a grenade launcher, luxury sedans, broken glass, screwdrivers, and a redhead with terrible teeth. These weapons are utilized in a variety of familiar settings: a neon \-drenched nightclub blasting pounding electronic music, a warehouse, a cargo hold, a cabin in the woods, a dilapidated apartment building, and even a dungeon hidden in the depths of an ostentatious mansion. As in The Night Comes for Us, Tjahjanto captures all his violence in smooth long takes, with edits only for emphasis, and utilizes slow motion, overhead shots, and POV shots from unexpected angles — the best of which comes when the camera does a flip in time with one of the stunt actors, though more often it’s mounted on the back of something like a shotgun, looking back at the person wielding it.
Aurora Ribero, a model, actress, and pop singer, stars as an assassin known only as “Thirteen” who has a crisis of conscience during a hit. Sent home, she befriends the young boy next door whose mother is brutally killed by the trio of villains. When the boy tries to get revenge for her, he’s kidnapped, and Thirteen sets out on a path of incredibly bloody violence to rescue him. This leads to a conflict with her superiors in the organization (known as Shadows), including her Instructor, whose name apparently is Umbra (which means “the darkest part of a shadow”). Even if Thirteen is able to kill the bad guys and rescue her friend, she will still have her bosses to deal with. It’s all going to end badly, but with a cameo from a star of The Raid.
Ribero’s performance is incredible, one of the most brutally physical by a female action star this writer has ever seen. It’s like Tjahjanto decided to make an entire movie in the style of the Moon Lee-Yukari Oshima fight from the end of Teresa Woo’s Angel. Even if she’s extensively doubled — and given Tjahjanto’s penchant for long takes, it doesn’t seem that she is, though the fact is that computers make that harder than ever to judge from the outside — it’s still remarkably tough work from someone whose only previous films appear to be teen romcoms and melodramas.
Without knowing enough about Indonesian martial arts to speak of their impact on the choreography, watching Tjahjanto’s films reminds not of the precision of Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruihan in The Raid, but rather presents fights that feel desperate and improvisatory, with actors covered head-to-toe in blood and reaching desperately for whatever happens to be at hand to fight off the cruelest deaths imaginable. It suits better actors who aren’t trained martial artists, and maybe adds a bit to the desperation of their movements. It’s also tonally the opposite of something like Xu Haofeng’s 100 Yards, with its careful demonstration of classical martial arts technique, or even the realistic and gymnastic ducking and brawling Saori Izawa excels at in Sakamoto and Sonomura’s Baby Assassins movies. How wonderful it is to be an action movie fan these days, to be able to watch all these marvelously different ways of mangling your fellow human beings.
DIRECTOR: Timo Tjahjanto; CAST: Aurora Ribero, Hana Malasan, Taskya Namya, Agra Pilliang; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: October 17; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 24 min.
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