Asian Audient: Headshot

This is the eighth installment in Asian Audient, a monthly series in which it is surprisingly difficult to find Asian films that were not made in China, Japan or South Korea.

My desperate desire to expand the horizons of a series that looks at a whole continent's worth of films, yet somehow is more limited in possible candidates than I could have ever imagined, has driven me to a movie I wouldn't have otherwise spent my time on: an undistinguished, modern-day martial arts movie.

But Headshot at least gets me to Indonesia for the first time, so that's something, right? (And it was easily sourced, through Netflix.)

Indonesia figures to be where I first set my own actual foot in Asia next April. That's right, I've never once been on Asian soil, but that will change when my wife and I take a trip to Bali to celebrate ten years of being married.

If I wanted to get there figuratively through this series, it occurred to me very belatedly -- after I'd already started watching Headshot -- that there was a far easier way to do it. The most famous Indonesian cinematic export in recent years has been The Raid, which I saw and enjoyed about two years ago. I had not yet seen the sequel, which some people say is even better.

Like its predecessor, though, The Raid 2: Redemption is directed by Gareth Evans, a director who hails from Wales. And though that was not a decisive factor in my decision -- in fact, I just forgot about this movie entirely -- I'm glad I wasn't so desperate that I succumbed to this kind of cheating of the spirit of this series. At least by choosing a different movie starring Raid star Iko Uwais, I got a movie directed by two legitimate Indonesians: Timo Tjajhanto and Kimo Stamboel.

Uwais -- whose name I could not properly remember, so I kept mentally referring to him as Udo Kier -- stars as a man who is essentially a lot like Jason Bourne. He washes ashore without his memory, having sustained a gun shot that has not quite killed him. As he convalesces in a hospital, he develops a bond with a female doctor (Chelsea Islan), who rather predictably becomes kidnapped by a man who is key to remembering his past identity, a vicious escaped criminal named Lee (Sunny Pang). Bodies ensue.

That's really all there is to the plot, but as I was watching it, I wondered if there was even that much. The way his memories get pieced together, and action set pieces get strung together, plot hardly matters at all. That can be a good thing, but in Headshot I found it to be a bit of an endurance test. It's not boring, precisely, as someone is almost always being kicked in the face in slow motion, leading an artful spurt of blood to arc across the frame. But the inclination to ask who this guy is, and why he's showing up here, and what it all means, is almost constant. The film makes the most meager attempts at developing a logical story or any characters within that, and though that's a common criticism of movies that are designed mostly as fight scene feeding mechanisms, it seems to be even more acutely a problem in this film.

That would all be okay if the fight scenes were really engaging, but all they really are is bloody. There's almost a comical level of brutality to much of the action here, not because the violence is so over-the-top that it makes a person squeamish, but because the wanton blood lust of the characters is so extreme that the only way to label their indifference toward the value of human life is to call it brutal. In fact, the extremity of the film is such that I can't tell if it is purposefully stylized or not. Notably, characters take an exceedingly long time to die, suffering certainly fatal quantities of bullets and other injuries yet still living long enough to perform anywhere from ten seconds to maybe a full minute of additional actions after they should obviously already be dead. In one typical example, a guy gets riddled with nearly a dozen bullets from a machine gun, and it's not enough to blow him off his feet backwards -- in fact, after absorbing all of this metal, he ultimately falls dead in a forward direction. If these scenes were obviously cartoonish, like a scene out of Kill Bill Vol. 1, then that would be something. But they are not executed at a level where that kind of intentional thought can be ascribed to them.

Uwais himself is a bit of a problem as well. I can't remember him making that much of an impression on me in The Raid, but he definitely did not make a negative impression. Here he kind of does, as he's got a real deficit of charisma and makes it nearly impossible to feel like we know him or relate to him as an action movie hero. The script is largely to blame, but Uwais needed to contribute a lot more than he does in the personality department.

So I did not like this film, and in fact had to see it over two nights -- something I can blame more on the fact that the first night was on the day of my son's seventh birthday party, an event that exhausted me and from which I wound down with a couple glasses of wine. But the viewing was instructional as a look into a burgeoning part of the film industry, an example of a film made regionally in Asia that is trying (and possibly succeeding) to cross over internationally. One way in which that's obviously the case is that Headshot premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, before debuting in a small release earlier this year. (Which means hey, it counts on this year's list!) Another is the fact that maybe a quarter of its dialogue is in English, though the accents are heavy enough that they go with subtitles for all spoken dialogue in the film. And if subtitles are going to be on screen the entire time anyway, one wonders what the point of 25% English dialogue is in the first place.

I didn't fully figure out the meaning of the title, though there were a couple scenes in which one combatant repeatedly stabbed his opponent in the head with a broken off sword. In a movie generally devoid of meaning, that's about as much meaning as you're likely to get.

September? I may go with the film I promised for August, which was Enter the Dragon. But two martial arts movies in a row may ultimately seem imprudent, and besides, I'm still trying to get to Thailand with one of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's earlier films. So essentially: You'll just have to wait and see.