Warning: This has to be the most vicious film in the library.
Right, here’s what you need to know going into The Night Comes for Us.
1. It’s on Netflix right now.
2. It boasts some of the most impressive talents from The Raid, The Raid 2: Berendal and Headshot, including Iko Uwais who fronted all three of those.
3. It’s ludicrously violent.
Seriously, we’re not kidding here and neither is the film.
The plot, which really is just an excuse to kill off scores of people in increasingly gag reflex-challenging ways, amounts to this:
A long-serving elite Triad enforcer responsible for many massacres (Joe Taslim of the first Raid and Fast & Furious 6 fame) sees a chance for redemption and betrays his bosses.
They want him dead and so send a lot of people after him and his old allies, including a former friend (that’ll be Iko Uwais, in a rare villainous role) who seems to pride ambition over loyalty.
Both men are ruthless bone-breaking murder machines and they’re not the only ones along for the ride as an increasingly wild cast of characters – including Julie Estelle who stood out as Hammer Girl in The Raid 2 – get involved.
Here’s the trailer:
Clip via Netflix
Which quite honestly doesn’t do this thing justice.
Heads are smashed open like watermelons, faces removed entirely by point-blank machine gun fire and a yo-yo piano wire thing is used to devastating effect.
To say any more would be to spoil the, er… fun? Is this fun? By the time the credits roll after two hours, it’s impossible to tell.
The Night Comes for Us is bleak. The violence doesn’t quite linger in a cruel sense, but nobody dies easy in this movie.
There’s a story buried in here, too, and it’s a fairly generic tale of warring factions, power struggles and a last-ditch bid to save one’s soul.
Taslim and Uwais have a nice The Departed-style dynamic going on, but you’re watching this for the chaos and there’s plenty to go around.
You’ll definitely be left with questions like, ‘Wait, why not just send the extreme video game bosses in instead of a squad of cannon fodder goons?’ and you might not like The Night Comes for Us, but you won’t soon forget it.
So much blood. Just so much blood…
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