Brief Story Line
Story focused on a young man named Max (Franki Darmawan) who was working as financial advisor in a bank. He was very close with his younger sister Misha (Maria Parkis) and her husband Leo (Djaitov Tigor - Trinity Traveller, Suami Suami Takut Istri TV series etc) who worked as a night club's bouncer. Max and Misha were children of a former criminal who had been in prison for a while.
Due to his access to various people who required money, Max was approached by a notorious loan shark, Ruel (J Ryan Karsten) through his right hand man Dave (Rendy Septino), though Max was obviously reluctant helping them. Meanwhile by chance, Max met and became close with a young woman named Kay (Dyana Rea - Puber etc) who was actually working for Ruel.
Things got further complicated when Ruel find out about Max' father and he was adamant to revenge him and his family. So what would happen to Max? Find them all in this action movie.
End of Brief Story Line
Well when I saw the trailer to this movie, I thought this would be interesting especially with good quality action sequence and I was willing to give it a try despite only 1 person in the film that I was familiar with, i.e. Djaitov Yanda (whose name was changed to Djaitov Tigor, likely because he was famous for playing the character Tigor in that popular TV series which my wife and I love to watch years ago).
I was also in doubt to watch this when I realized the duration was 2 hours 38 minutes, nevertheless I still went on with it. And my concern was apparently justified as with such long duration, the movie felt excessively long for me. There were too much details that I thought were not necessary. Perhaps it was to give proper context but I thought it was still too long. In any case, the overly detail story telling did not help to make sense of some things, which was too bad. Few of the most notable things I noticed were bank would not allow their employee to have long hair like Max, or the fact that beggars are allowed to hang around outside the bank, or Max amazing fighting ability and many more.
However, in terms of the action, I was pretty much in awe of how exceptionally good they were done. I felt like watching a Hollywood or Hong Kong action movie. And the great sound effects really helped a lot in making them looked awesome. To be honest, without those wonderful action and hand to hand fight sequence, I would have stopped watching the movie in the middle. Oh and the climax fight scenes were totally badass, even if they were a bit excessive. I think the wonderful actions were possible because of the hard work from action director Ryan Adrian Tedja (stunt coordinator for the movie #66 which happened to be directed by this film's director/writer Asun Mawardi). Btw, the fights were violent but not as brutal as The Raid (or its sequel), making this one still qualified to be shown on Disney+ albeit categorized for 17+.
During the closing credits, I was actually hoping to see probably some bloopers of the mistakes or "accidents" that might have happened during the making of the fight scenes, but there was no such thing. However I did find out that the sound effects were done in Thailand and the film also have a lot of stuntmen. And there were also credits given to the sponsors which some of them were a bit too obvious as product placements in the film.
The cast were surprisingly good in the action sequence, though it was hard not to miss the inexperience of acting by some of the actors in here. The only ones that I thought were decent enough were Djaitov Tigor and Dyana Rea (most likely because they had more experience). Oh J Ryan Karsten was not bad either as the villain. At least his dialogues were convincing, rather than some of the others.
Overall this movie should have been entertaining if the story telling was done a bit faster without excessive details which frankly I think were unnecessary and thus reducing the duration. Plus a bit of details & dialogues review to make it better would go a long way. So if you just want to see a good quality action in an Indonesian movie, then this one is for you. As long as you can bear those shortcomings, then you should be able to enjoy it. For me personally though, the shortcomings were just about balanced by the fantastic fight scenes.
Mike's movie moments rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
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