Action and horror movie lovers of a certain age will warmly remember many examples of classic extreme violence. They were the scenes that had you coming out of the cinema ecstatically yelling to your mates “what about the bit where…!” Then there was the almost mythical stuff you delighted over after somehow getting the bootleg VHS copy of the overseas version—or some decades later, the stuff you finally, finally got on imported, uncensored DVDs.
Here is a movie so jam-packed with moments of instantly classic extreme violence, film fans who relate to the paragraph above will be delirious by the end of it. The Night Comes for Us is an insane splatter action movie that’s so over-the-top, it makes 2008’s ultraviolent Rambo seem restrained.
Sure, advances in visual effects technology in the modern era mean that those classic moments of extreme violence aren’t so special any more. They’re much easier to achieve and much more common, but skilled filmmakers can still make your jaw drop and your eyes bulge. Timo Tjahjanto is one of them, providing a feast here of inventive, combat-driven gore that’s a joy to behold.
Some of the filmmaking choices are disappointing. The pacing is a bit all over the shop and various narrative elements are either under-explained or over-explained. Also, in a film packed with this many action set pieces, some are weaker than others and they stick out like severed thumbs.
But it’s impossible to look very unfavourably on a film that provides such a relentless onslaught of gratifying blood-letting. It will not fail to impress its target audience. The cringe-inducing uses of cattle bones, broken glass and craft knives to savagely injure are especially awesome. They’ll probably have a lot of modern fans pausing their Netflix streams to excitedly message their mates “what about the bit where…!”
