Headshot, 2016.
Directed by Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto.
Starring Iko Uwais, Chelsea Islan, Sunny Pang, Very Tri Yulisman, and Julie Estelle.
SYNOPSIS:
An injured amnesiac is nursed back to health and begins to piece his life back together only to discover the brutal truth about who he is and where he came from.
Thanks to Gareth Evans’ The Raid and its expansive sequel Indonesian action movies were well and truly put on the map a few years back and those hits keep on coming, the latest being Headshot, which also happens to star Iko Uwais from both of those movies.
Uwais plays an injured man washed up on a beach and found by a local. He is taken to hospital where a kindly doctor called Ailin (Chelsea Islan) gives him the name Ishmael and nurses him back to health. Once Ishmael is back on his feet he cannot remember anything about his life before he was found but his injuries suggest he was shot in the head as there is still some debris left in the wound. However, it appears Ishmael is a wanted man, especially wanted by legendary gangster Lee (Sunny Pang) and his mob of bloodthirsty goons, most of whom have the same expert martial arts skills as Ishmael, and when Lee sends his thugs out to attack the bus on which Ailin is travelling on, Ishmael’s instincts kick in and he goes on the hunt as his memories start to come back, and he realises that his ties to Lee must be severed for good.
No matter how good or bad Headshot is it is always going to be compared to The Raid, which has earned itself a reputation as the benchmark for other action movies from Indonesia to aspire to – and rightly so – but Headshot does try to approach its action from a slightly different angle by framing it with a heart-wrenching story and populating it with characters that directors Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto desperately want you to get behind. All to be commended but by drawing out a lot of the more static scenes and trying a little too hard to make you care for Ishmael and Ailin the attention levels start to drift a little – just a little – until the action slams in to wake you up again.
And wake you up it does as Headshot displays some of the finest (read – brutal) violence seen on-screen outside of… well, The Raid, if truth be told. But where The Raid relies on the speed of the actors, camera operators and editors for a lot of its intensity, Headshot goes more for the bludgeon of heavy weapons splitting heads open, shotgun blasts to the face and emptying whole magazines of bullets just to off one man, and that isn’t to say that Headshot doesn’t have quickly edited hand-to-hand combat because it does, but the violence here is geared more towards the gory end of things that evokes the likes of ‘80s giants like Commando and Rambo: First Blood Part II, although when the storytelling elements kick back in the film looks towards the caring and sharing 1990s for inspiration, which does get a little tonally jarring at times and slows things down a tad too much.
But despite some of the storytelling clichés and occasional dips into over-sentimentality Headshot is without question the hardest hitting and most brutal action movie of the year, displaying some astonishing martial arts techniques and inventive uses of weaponry that give the movie the same video game feel of The Raid, although this film would likely be a sideway-scrolling beat-‘em-up rather than a level-by-level shooter like that movie. Naturally, being an Asian genre movie it does run a little too long and could easily have 20 minutes trimmed out of it without doing it any harm; in fact, you could chop out a lot of the drawn-out emotional stuff, leave in all of the action and most of the dialogue (there isn’t a lot) and you would probably end up with the ultimate popcorn action movie of this decade so far. However, as it is Headshot is nastier than The Raid, shorter than The Raid 2 and immensely enjoyable if you like hyper-violent bloodbaths and total carnage.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Chris Ward
Originally published June 5, 2017. Updated April 15, 2018.
