★★★½
“An unexpected Valentine’s gift.”
It’s always nice when a film manages to surpass expectations. Coming in, I was thinking this was going to be nothing but a low-rent, dubbed, caped crusader flick. And, to be honest, that is exactly what it is: a low-rent dubbed, caped crusader flick. But it proved considerably more entertaining than, say, Terminator: Dark Fate, which I saw the same weekend, and which cost roughly a thousand times as much to make.
It has an interesting hook. Waitress Srimaya (Linden) is recruited by a film-maker, Bono (Settle, the only American in the cast), who wants to make a superhero movie that will be a positive role-model for the citizens of crime-riddled Batavia City. With no producer willing to back him, Bono opts to go the viral route. When he sees Srimaya’s martial arts skills in action, he brings her on board to star in videos where she goes up against and beats robbers, muggers and other street punks, clad in a fetching little mask and cape designed by stylist friend Wawan (Dagienks). But her actions bring her to the attention of crime lord, Shadow, who is carrying out a vendetta against the local police.
There’s a nice sense of progression through the film, with the heroine’s gear and costume improving from the pretty basic to the impressively nifty, as she and Wawan learn from her experiences, e.g. add more padding. It also is willing to kill off people you didn’t expect, and if the true identity of Shadow is something you might well figure out before the end, the reasons behind it are unexpected and well-considered. Even the dubbing didn’t irritate me, in the way it usually does – though this may partly have been been because I still put English subtitles on!
The main appeal is the action, however. Indonesian films have a reputation of late for being remarkably impressive, and if this isn’t quite The Raid or The Night Comes For Us, choreographer Robert Suwandi delivers the goods. Linden in particular, is better than expected, and I also liked the Suicide Squad-like trio of female henchmen used by Shadow. The directorial style does tend a little too much to the hyper in terms of movement and cutting, yet it also does a good job of meshing practical and CGI – better, indeed, than Terminator: Dark Fate. For the CGI is used to enhance, rather than replace the physical effects, in particular during a car-chase following a bank robbery.
My interest in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has steadily waned as it has become an unstoppable behemoth. Films like this, however, I find considerably more interesting. Not necessarily because the stories they tell are particularly novel, just that they seem created out of a desire to tell those stories, rather than as cold, calculated commercial entities. I’d rather see a film with rough edges here and there, made with passion, than one which is clearly just a job for those involved. This movie is a good indication of why.
Dir: Ubay Fox, Agus Pestol
Star: Estelle Linden, Matthew Settle, Arie Dagienkz, Fendy Pradana