Anyone familiar with the filmography of Timo Tjahjanto will know that the dude likes things dark. Be it his staggeringly gritty action films such as Headshot and The Night Comes For Us that try to out-grime the like of The Raid, to his vicious May The Devil Take You series that act as difect love-letters to the Evil Dead movies, the last thing you’d be expecting would be a big, daffy and incredibly colourful action comedy that does everything in its power to play up to the Netflix algorithm.
Well, in 2022, that’s exactly what we got as the Indonesian director traded in crazed bloodletting in gloomy environments to crazed bloodletting in bright ones with The Big 4, a ballsy, brassy extravaganza that ranks up the humour, yet curiously keeps the high levels of violence Tjahjanto tends to favor.
Prepare for wild, tonal inconsistencies and absurdly exaggerated characters as the director moves his work into the light and tries to have a little fun with mass murder an explosive devices.
The Big 4 are a quartet of highly trained assassin’s who have been raised from children by the elderly Petrus to become a group of vigilantes in the hope that he can make the world a better place by having his charges storm places like illegal hospitals that remove the organs from orphan children to transplant into the rich. To be fair, it’s not a bad shout, but as we watch leader Topan, frenzied Alpha, sniper Jenggo and token bait Pelor take apart their latest target piece by piece, their surrogate father has some seismic news for them – he’s breaking up the band. The reason is that his actual daughter, Dina, is on the verge of being sworn in as a police officer and in an effort to restore the time he’s lost with her, he’s renouncing his criminal ways to rebuild bridges with her guilt free. The Big 4 are upset, but they understand – however, Petrus’ noble intentions are almost instantly scuppered when he’s murdered by a crash helmeted assailant who claims to have a connection to him. But while Topan is the one to find his body, Dina finds him crouched over her father’s corpse and after Topan escapes, the Big 4 soon split.
Three years pass and we find that Dina has become a gifted – if obsessive – police officer, but in an attempt to get her to stop making the rest of the department look bad, she’s forced into taking vacation time. However, after discovering a vital clue about her father’s past, she chooses to visit Paranis Villa on the picturesque Bersi Island in order to hopefully uncover the truth and finds Topan who now runs the Villa, but doesn’t recognise him.
What follows is an orgy of destruction that seems like the result of the merging of John Woo and Chuck Jones as the man who murdered Petrus comes after his children – both by blood and adopted – to settle some mysterious grudge. As Topan and Dina attempt to avoid getting riddled with bullet holes, they seek the rest of the Big 4 for a reunion that’ll leave a bodycount higher than the result of drinking Jenggo’s spiked tea.
It becomes pretty clear from the moment that The Big 4 starts, that Timo Tjahjanto is all about having fun. To be fair, you can’t exactly blame him as the Lion’s share of his filmography to date has largely consisted of strikingly dark and brutal affairs that tend to trawl though the gutter of human existence as various people lose their lives in a variety of savage ways. However, this is plainly Tjahjanto throwing off that edgy persona and diving headlong into a more openly cartoonish realm packed full of comic timing, farcical misunderstandings and vast sense of the irrelevance that still retains his joy for head popping gore and catastrophic blood loss.
Straight of the bat, you can tell that the movie is all about excess. Nothing is going to stop Tjahjanto from pumping this movie full of every single comedy gag he can think of and not since the days of Michael Bay and Bad Boys II has a director pushed the realms of the deranged action/comedy to bursting point as the movie clocks in at an ill-advised two hours and twenty one minutes. Unless your name is James Cameron and your movie is True Lies, going over the two hour mark for a film that’s supposed to be an adrenaline rush is usually a bad idea as you audience, battered senseless after two hours of gags and frags, usually are exhausted by the time the finale rolls around. However, maybe because the film is a Netflix premier and thus isn’t as intense as a cinema experience, The Big 4 proves to be quite a smooth ride that scores quite highly in both thrills and laughs. In fact, considering how much of the time the cast spends screaming for various reasons, the Bad Boys II analogy isn’t actually that far off (Tjahjanto matches Bay’s colour pallete rather nicely too), but thankfully some genuine humour makes the whole thing bearable.
There’s a real feeling that Tjahjanto has been dying to be funny on this scale for a while and his cast go all in to try and give ample hysteria to his vision. In fact, all of the main cast is given at least one crazy, showstopping setpiece to do, be it Abimana Aryasatya’s Topan trying to silently subdue to thugs to avoid alerting Dina, to Arie Kriting’s shock haired Jenggo who has revealed to have gone off and started a tourist trap/cult after ditching the assasin work. Even the type of characters you’d expect to play the straight man are given ludicrous jokes to play with. Watch Putri Marino’s buttoned down Dina drink drugged tea and proceed to lurch around the place with massive pupils and act like one of the possessed in May The Devil Take You, or Marthino Lio’s dapper villain show off his salsa skills while his “secretary” proves to be a dab hand at welding a bazooka.
Some will no doubt either find the comedy far too obnoxious to bear, or get grumpy that Tjahjanto ditched the grit, but considering that the director is about to make the leap to Hollywood with sequels to Nobody and The Beekeeper, it actually makes perfect sense. Also, in an attempt to (sort of) ground action scenes involving an incendiary device named the Lucifer’s Fart and jokes about Jenggo finger fucking his beloved sniper’s rifle, there’s a sweet Guardians Of The Galaxy/Fast And Furious thread about found families looking out for one another that inserts some much needed heart into the Three-Stooges-with-guns insanity.
It’s way too long and Tjahjanto isn’t showing an ounce of restraint, but you can’t say that The Big 4 doesn’t give you what you paid for and as the director moves into the realms of American action films, this garish calling card bodes well for future endeavors. However, considering that the movie ends on a cliffhanger that would do Marvel proud and did big business for Netflix across the world, expect to see The Big 5 fairly sharpish once the director finishes bringing his enthusiastic action splatter freak outs to the West.
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