We’re big fans of The Raid and The Raid 2 here at Film Fluff HQ and it’s always great when you meet a fellow fan of these brutal yet beautiful Indonesian martial arts crime dramas. A fellow film blogger, 500 Days of Film, has also been captivated by the high-octane action of these gloriously cathartic films, which have a strong story at their core despite misleadingly appearing to be just a string of violent set-pieces squeezed into a feature-length running time.
So, when another Indonesian film is released in the same genre that stars the lead from The Raid films but minus Welsh director Gareth Evans, 500 Days of Film and I decided to make Headshot the first film to watch in our long-distance film club…
…they should have kept the Welshman…
When a mysterious man with amnesia washes up on the shore with a bullet wound to the head, a young doctor nurses him back to health and names him Ishmael. Little do they know that this man has a dangerous past and it is soon back to haunt them with violent consequences…
I usually like to start a review with the positives… it was short.
Now for the negatives: the acting in this film is so wooden that it makes your local amateur dramatics society look like the RSC; the characters speak Indonesian and yet drift in and out of English for no reason whatsoever, which is distracting; the camera person must have been souped up on coffee and E-numbers as the camera movements are shaky and jerky to the point of nausea; the fight sequences, whilst admirable in places, are poorly edited and all tension and excitement is drained from them as a result; some of the choreography in the final fight scene is laughable and is one small step away from resorting to nipple-twisters and wet-willies; the aim of the villains is so poor that they make Storm Troopers look like Olympic Gold-Medallists on the Rifle Range, and the visual effects must have been done on a computer so ancient that it makes the BBC green screen computers look like Apple products!
As you can probably tell, I had more fun writing this review than I did watching the film. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the high quality of Gareth Evans’ fine work, but this turkey is to be avoided.
02/10.
500 Days of Film has also written a review of this film, which can be found here. I highly recommend exploring her webpage too as it is a fantastic read.
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