Foxtrot Six - An Indonesian Action Movie with a touch of Hollywood

This was a movie where its trailer had been shown many times in the cinema. When I saw the trailer, it gave me the impression of a full action Indonesian movie. Obviously it quite intrigued me and so I requested my wife's help to buy the tickets for us. Well let us get on with the movie and see if it lived up to my expectations. Warning spoiler on the story. You can go straight to my views below the End of Brief Story Line.

Brief Story Line (SpoilerAlert!)

Set in the year 2031, Indonesia was in dire state where food had become scarce commodity. The country was led by some corrupt officials from Piranas party and a group of rebels who was called Reform were trying to save the country. Angga (Oka Antara - Aruna dan Lidahnya etc) a former marine turned congressman, proposed to capture the Reform leaders. But he would later find out that things were not what it seemed to be.

He then decided to join forces with the Reform. As the government planned to have a grand evil scheme, Angga together with his former elite team: Oggi (Verdi Solaiman - ReuniZ etc), the half crazy Bara (Rio Dewanto - Filosofi Kopi 2 etc), the smart one Tino (Arifin Putra - The Raid 2 etc) and the technology expert Ethan (Mike Lewis - Message Man etc) tried to save the people. Joined by a mysteriously good soldier & great sniper Spec (Chicco Jerikho - Bukaan 8 etc), the six of them had to run against time and fight with some of the worst military soldiers led by Wisnu (Edward Akbar - Night Bus).

So how would the story conclude? Find them all in this action movie.

End of Brief Story Line

Well, this movie was half of what I expected. As I said above, it gave the impression of full nonstop action, but it turned out it was not. After a rather excruciating first 15-20 minutes of characters introduction, the story started to become slightly good when the Reform began to appear. And only when the rest of former Angga's elite group were introduced then the movie finally got interesting. I personally felt that those early scenes except for the scene when Angga met with his girlfriend Sari (Julie Estelle - The Night Comes for Us etc) was really awful. Not too sure why but I guess probably because it was too detail and overly long. Luckily though, after the whole team was together, the story pace kept up and was largely interesting till the end. 

The 6 lead guys were actually pretty cool. Each had his own capabilities that were shown briefly at the start but mostly in the finale fights. To my surprise most of them (except for Arifin Putra whom I had seen in The Raid 2 before), were able to show their action skills, albeit one or two more than the others. The most convincing one was surely Rio Dewanto as Bara who was given quite large portion of fighting scenes, while the rest of them were more on the ability to shoot. However, despite the good action sequences, there were few scenes which were far from perfect. The extreme ability to avoid death multiple times were one of them. Yes a lot of Hollywood movies were also similar in this area, so it was no surprise that this one did have some of those as well. Although there was one scene in particular that for me and my wife was just not good enough (the one involving Spec and that skillful villain towards the end).

It was actually quite refreshing to see an Indonesian movie which had pretty decent special effects. It may not be spectacular but some of them were quite good. Mostly it was adequately done and only very few scenes where the CGI were quite obvious. But as a whole it was certainly better than some B class Hollywood movies. It would seem that the budget was pretty high on this area. The sound effects & music score was also very good. We could enjoy them in the studio with Dolby Surround 7.1 system with the sound of guns blazing & explosions quite convincing.

As a movie with the name Mario Kassar as executive producer, it certainly had the Hollywood nuance. Kassar was very experienced in producing some successful movies such as The Terminator movies, Rambo movies, Basic Instinct and many others. So most likely he could give some valuable inputs to the Indonesian team. This film was written and directed by Randy Korompis in his directorial debut. Now I do not have the capability of saying he was really great or bad as I am no expert myself, so I would leave those area to the real critics. And as most likely the movie was aimed towards foreign market, the whole film was spoken in English language (only one time there was Indonesian word said. Like my wife commented, they surely still remember their root language). The English speaking part might either be the best decision of the movie makers or the worst kind. For me personally, I would have liked it better if they use Indonesian language throughout. No offence, cause not all the actors & actresses were really that fluent.

The whole movie duration was 114 minutes including the end credit scene. Btw, if you waited long enough, there was an interesting mid credit scene and an amusing scene after all the names was shown (most likely for promotion purpose). Talking about the promotion, there were scenes which were done a bit rough and too obviously shown as advertisement. Oh ya, this film is definitely for adults. It was perfectly categorized for 21+ due to some graphic violence and few foul language. Even though the gruesome violence were not as many as other Indonesian movies like The Raid or Headshot but still plenty of them. The movie also had few lighter scenes (usually involving Mike Lewis' character) and few touching scenes as well. It had an ending that did not provide too much of a surprise and may not be satisfying for all.

Overall, I thought this movie was quite a good attempt in penetrating the foreign market. It had some cool action sequence, a bit of drama and pretty decent visual effects. Indonesian movie goers most likely would be pleased seeing we could finally make a quite well done action film with a taste of Hollywood. So if you are looking for those category in an Indonesian movie, then you would definitely enjoy this. But if you expect the full really bloody action or the major blockbuster Hollywood movies, then this was not one of those. The choice is yours.

Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

PS: Sadly during the movie playing, some of the people could not keep their voices down, especially the one sitting next to my wife who was very loud and gave comments to most of the scenes. This was not the movie experience she was hoping for and hopefully we could avoid this kind of behavior from audience in future.