Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Man gets found in the water, shot. He recovers, but has amnesia. With the help of a love interest, he slowly starts to remember who he is — turns out he is a killing machine who did some pretty bad stuff in the past. But now that he’s escaped the brainwashing, he’s out to set things right by going on a killing spree, only this time in the name of justice!
Yep, that’s the plot of BOURNE IDENTITY. Also, it is the plot of HEADSHOT. Only this time imagine it as an Indonesian ass kicking film starring Iko Uwais (THE RAID) and a homage to the glory days of high body count Hong Kong filmmaking. Oh and instead of a shady spy organization, here there’s a shady child-stealing gangster who was also a father figure to our hero. But who cares about plot when you have the guy from THE RAID going around throat stabbing people? We just need the thinnest of justifications to string the maimings together.
HEADSHOT was directed by Kimo Stamboel and Timo Tjahjanto, aka “the Mo brothers.” I haven’t seen their earlier work, but they swear they toned this one down, as one of them put it, “so my daughter could see it.” This got a huge laugh from the midnight madness crowd at TIFF, because this movie is already over the top with fist-induced gore.
The film opens with an extraordinary sequence that ought to be taught in film schools for, “how to open a film like you are not fucking around.” There’s a prisoner rebellion in a maximum security joint. This comes complete with ever-escalating combat techniques, including hand-to-hand, a gunfight set about five feet apart, and then a full exchange of gunfire between half a dozen convicts and as many prison guards, with automatic weapons, again at about three paces. And after it all, crime boss Lee (Sunny Pang) saunters through, stepping over bodies like Darth fucking Vader. He’s just convinced a ton of criminals to head to their own certain death for his freedom. Now *that’s* an entrance! And it is a badass opening — balls-out action, an inventive scene, and economy of storytelling.
The story then slows down for a bit as our hero wakes up and tries to piece together who he is. Since he can’t remember, he starts calling himself Ishmael. But things don’t stay slow for long, as goons try to attack him in the hospital, and meanwhile Lee is stacking up the bodies while defending his gun dealing empire. I’ll leave the plot description there so as no to get into spoiler territory. But some of the cooler set pieces involve a fight while chained to a table, somebody fighting their way out of a police station, and a fight on the beach with the shoreline turning red with blood.
The bottom line is that Iko Uwais is a badass. He’s one of the best martial artists and fight choreographers working in movies today. You already know this if you’ve seen either of the RAID movies. The setup here is a bit more complicated than the straightforward simplicity of THE RAID: REDEMPTION (as it was known in the US), and the editing and beats aren’t quite as tight, but it doesn’t much matter — the fights are still awesome.
I also liked Sunny Pang as the villain. His character, Lee, is indisputably a bad guy, and yet Sunny Pang has such charisma that you just love to see him on screen. He’s great at martial arts, but he’s also just legitimately a good actor who’s played a diverse set of roles. Some of his lines are in English, which happens to make it easier for Western audiences to understand. The primary reason though is that he’s from Singapore, and doesn’t speak much Indonesian. (It is common in Southeast Asia for people to speak English as a mutually understood language when they don’t understand each other’s native language).
I saw HEADSHOT at the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness, and it was the perfect audience to see it with. See this in the theater if you can.
