Directed by Kimo Stamboel & Timo Tjahjanto (aka The Mo Brothers)
Written by Timo Tjahjanto
Cast: Iko Uwais, Chelsea Islan, Sunny Pang, Julie Estelle
Soundtrack: Aria Prayogi & Fajar Yuskemal
This was a rough one.
Relative to The Raid and The Raid 2, I didn’t have the highest expectations for Headshot, given that Iko Uwais and his fight team were involved, but Gareth Evans wasn’t writing or directing. However, I figured that it would at least be an exciting, bloody romp. I was not expecting to be so exhausted that I’d effectively check out with a solid forty-five minutes left in the film, but that’s exactly what happened.
Headshot isn’t nearly as boring and joyless as, say, Jason Bourne. In fact, compared to that film, the fight scenes are well done (the camera still shakes, but at least it’s a few feet further back), and the first hour or so of the movie actually works pretty well. However, the end result is the same, in that I can’t recommend either film as a whole; certainly not theatrically.
The biggest problem with Headshot is that it’s in No Man’s Land in terms of length, pacing, and character development. The two most obvious ways to fix this movie are either:
A. Trim it down by a good half hour and quicken the pace
or
B. Keep it the same length, but cut the fight scenes down and beef up the characters.
I don’t mind a martial arts film having a thin plot to hang the action on, I understand that the fighting is what gets most people in the door, but Headshot leaves you with too many unanswered questions (that it could have answered without even stopping for an exposition scene) that I can’t overlook its flaws. For example, you might think that by the end of the film you’d learn why our protagonist was shot in the head in the first place, but, no, you never find out.
To put it another way, there’s another layer that this film often hints at (like, I think most of the fights are supposed to have extra importance because of pre-existing relationships), but the movie doesn’t do any groundwork to truly establish this, so the supposed significance is lost for the audience.
In terms of the fight choreography itself, I can’t deny that this team is proficient at what it does, but in terms of actually capturing it for the screen, some of the direction and editing is just strange, if not downright poor. More importantly though is that the movie wants to have it both ways, where the violence is gritty and realistic, except our hero can keep going and going like the Energizer bunny even though he’s pretty much taken as much damage as he’s dished out (if not more), and by all rights should be incapacitated, if not dead. I don’t go down the “suspension of disbelief” road all that often, but Headshot has too much of a disconnect to go undiscussed.
In the end, this is a movie I wished I could have enjoyed and recommended, but its just not up to snuff. There are plenty of other fish in the martial arts sea that are more worth your time and money.
At least it gave us a great trailer though.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
P.S.
If you ever care enough to watch Headshot on streaming or Redbox, you can go ahead and turn it off after the police station, because it’s not going to get any better from that point on.