The Big 4

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.

The Big 4 doesn't quite have the storytelling finesse of Timo's earlier works, yet it's a fun little action romp. The plot is just an excuse for the lead characters (retired assassins and a cop) to go after a rival gang and find their mentor's murderer, cooking up some fantastic set-pieces along the way. The humor works when it's not trying to be too goofy. One instance of it not working is that "possessed" scene, which almost looks like a badly done parody of Timo's own May the Devil Take You. That said, I loved how Timo attributed some quirks to each of his leads. Topan (Abimana Aryasatya) has a crush on his mentor's daughter Dina (Putri Marino), Jenggo (Arie Kriting) is high on his sniper rifle (which he refers to as his girlfriend), Alpha (Lutesha) comes up with an explosive gas cylinder known as Lucifer's Fart 3000 (LOL!), and Pelor (Kristo Immanuel) is always the "bait" whenever the gang infiltrates a baddie hideout.

All of this plays into the film's screenplay and character decisions. But, who can look past the fun action choreography? Every time a set-piece breaks out, you know it's going to surprise you in more ways than one. That's the beauty of watching a Timo Tjahjanto actioner. It's deranged and atmospheric, with Batara Goempar's camera constantly on the move, either capturing gory kills or exciting knife/gun/fist fights. The cast make most of the emotional bits work, and while you wouldn't consider anything here as deeply moving, it's good enough to make you care for their happy ending. Timo leaves room for a sequel, and although The Big 4 is no The Night Comes for Us, it offers exactly what it says it does.

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.

At the beginning of the film, I thought, "this might be interesting", but as the film went on, I lost my interest. The story isn't really good and I couldn't get used to the humor either (exept for a few times). However, the action in this movie is very good. This is also the reason why I kept watching the film as I was always waiting for the next good action scene. There are 1-2 scenes that don't really look good and don't really make sense either but all in all, the action is well done and it's a lot of fun to watch.

If you are in the mood for good action, you can watch the film, but expect that you may be bored until the next action scene and that the story won't really catch you.

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.