The Big 4

This was just unnecessarily too long, and the humor was just too infantile, forced and outdated. The sad part is that it could've easily been much better had some of the cheesy dialog been omitted, and the entire film's 141 min runtime cut down to no more than 90 mins. The long dragged out and mostly predictable and silly scenes took away from what started as a decent story, then went full on stink-cheese with the lame outdated humor, and cliches. The casting and performances were decent for the most part, but their infantile dialogue and demeanors took away much of any caring for their characters. The action was hit and miss, although there were some cool choreographed fights in the third act. Had this been shorter, I may have said it's a decent one-time watch, but as is, I felt it was a waste of my time and not worth even the one-time watch.

The Big 4 are the adopted children of Petrus, who has trained them to be perfect assassins well atleast 3 of them as the youngest one mostly is a bait. Petrus is murdered leading to the big 4 to go on hiding while his actual daughter becomes a police officer and is obsessed to solve his murder. How the daughter teams up with the 4 to take revenge on their father's killer, forms rest of the story.

The tone never gets serious with constant funny lines thrown around. Many jokes don't land correctly, but the loud comedy somehow carries the story forward while the bloody action set pieces take care of the rest. Much of the jokes fall under the silly category but the action set pieces gets more fun whenever they get silly which should be credited for the innovativeness. The story is built up for a sequel so the main reason for the conflict is still kept unrevealed.

Timo Tjahjanto is one of the best action directors in the business. If you need convincing, just watch Headshot (2016) and The Night Comes For Us (2018), both of which deliver amazing fight choreography and brutal violence aplenty.

Unfortunately, Timo doesn't appear to be so great at comedy, of which there is lots in The Big 4; his attempts at humour in this film are pretty terrible, making it quite tedious at times, especially whenever the film takes a break from the kicking and punching and shooting and explosions.

Things kick off in fine form, as the titular quartet of vigilantes make a gang of evil organ traffickers pay the price for their crimes. It's gleefully OTT, the screen painted red with the blood of the guilty. The foursome -- Topan (Abimana Aryasatya), Jenggo (Arie Kriting), Alpha (Lutesha) and Pelor (Kristo Immanuel) -- have been trained as assassins by their adoptive father Petrus, whose real daughter, policewoman Dina (Putri Marino), has no idea about her dad's other 'children'.

Three years later, Petrus is murdered, and Dina investigates, discovering her father's secret...

The comedy kicks in when Dina encounters her 'brothers and sister', who have now retired from the killing business, and the film suffers for it, the silliness being more irritating than funny. Of course, the film ends with a jaw-dropping action set-piece in which Tjahjanto piles on the stylish ultra-violence with aplomb, but it's not easy to forget all of the daft nonsense that precedes it.

9/10 for the action, 2/10 for the rest, which averages out at 5.5/10 (rounded up to 6 for IMDb).

I'd count the director's THE NIGHT COMES FOR US as one of my all-time favourite movies, an absolutely blistering attack on the senses and all-out martial arts hit. This follow-up adopts an action comedy template and has more of that top action direction, but at the same time it somehow misses the mark. At two and a half hours in length, the action hits but only occupies a third of that running time. The rest is made up of inane comedy and no story. The characters are very limited here, the actors unknown and lacking gravitas, and some of them cross over into being annoying. The gory FX and fight choreography are as great as ever, but I wish the rest wasn't such a drag.

Tjahjanto's The Night Comes For Us is one of the best, most brutal action films I've seen in recent years, and Headshot was also a solid contribution to the genre, so I expected quite a lot more from this.

Sometimes comedy is very unique to certain cultures and doesn't really translate well. I don't know if that's the case here or if it was just not well-written, but most of the comedic parts (which make up the bulk of the film) are really cringe-inducing and not entertaining. The parts where the comedy mixed with the action were somewhat more successful. But overall there is just not enough action here.

At almost 2 and a half hours, the film is simply too long. They could have cut half an hour and it still would have been excessive. Tonally, the film is all over the place, and not in a way that was very satisfying. The best parts were those in which the violence was hilariously and intentionally over-the-top. But there were really only a couple of scenes like that in the entire film, and the "down time" between those moments was frankly difficult to sit through.

They clearly set this up for a sequel. I do think there's potential there, but only if it's a lot more focused than this first film and better prioritizes the action over the silly character moments that don't really work.