THE BIG 4 is the new one from Indonesian writer-director Timo Tjahjanto, who gave us THE NIGHT COMES FOR US, easily one of the best action movies of recent years. He’s said that this one is a comedy he made when Netflix Indonesia asked for something more family friendly, so I thought I needed to keep my hopes in check. But a few minutes in it’s clear that some silly humor isn’t gonna get in the way of the gory headshots, stabbings, and bone-cracking martial arts duels you expect in a Tjahjanto joint. It’s an action comedy in the traditional sense of an actual action movie that also has some laughs, not in the sense of a comedy that half-assedly employs genre cliches as set up for riffing. The characters here happen to be goofballs, but that’s overshadowed by the legitimacy of the action the movie delivers.

The first Tjahjanto movie I saw was HEADSHOT (2016), where a group of orphans were trained from birth to fight and kill. Same thing here, except they become good guys, not evil bastards. They’re vigilantes who go after horrible people. But it’s a messed up thing to do, it’s a dark and dangerous world to live in, and there’s tragedy and emotion just like in the non-comedies. It’s just in a context where it leaves you smiling at the end. A wholesome smile, not an evil one.

In the opening, the legendary Big 4 pull some MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE shit to rescue kids from an orphanage that’s a front for selling children’s organs to the super rich. The goofiest part of the plan is that grown adult Pelor (Kristo Immanuel), the youngest and least trained of the team, has somehow managed to get in there undercover as one of the orphans. Second goofiest is that the client Mr. Bob’s old age makeup is so obvious I can’t imagine anyone being surprised when he pulls it off to reveal that he’s Topan (Abimana Aryasatya, who played Fatih in THE NIGHT COMES FOR US and the title role in the super hero movie GUNDALA). I have to admit I was a little disappointed they didn’t have him fight with the makeup on, kinda like when the uptight mayor starts dancing in Michael Jackson’s GHOSTS.

That’s okay – Topan shoots a guy through a window and fights four or five guys with nightsticks, and the nurse turns out to be Alpha (Lutesha, MAY THE DEVIL TAKE YOU TOO), who bangs people’s heads against walls and x-ray lightboards, pulls a bomb out of Pelor’s ass and blows up some guys. There’s an actually intense gun battle and a rocketing-oxygen-tank-POV shot and their sniper Jenggo (Arie Kriting, GHOST WRITER 1 and 2) interrupts his meditation to clear their exit path with his rifle Siska (whose name is painted lovingly on the stock, below a pair of feminine eyes, one winking).

Pelor was stripped down for surgery, so he’s now wrapped in a blanket, which he pathetically holds up as if to block the orphans’ view of their captors getting brick sized chunks blown off of their heads. Concerned about their trauma. Maybe that’s the family friendly part.

When their boss Petrus (Budi Ros) arrives in a van to pick them up there’s a four-way split-screen and a slow motion walk, and the title appears over them in big yellow letters with a bullet hole in the 4. So we know we’re off to a good start. The style alone welcomes us to the wild adventures of a ragtag band of badasses (plus Pelor).

Then their adventures are cancelled. Petrus announces the shocking news that he’s retiring to spend more time with his biological daughter Dina (Putri Marino), who is about to graduate from the police academy. She doesn’t know what he does and thinks he’s a deadbeat because he’s always showing up late if he’s around at all. And wouldn’t you fuckin know it, he doesn’t show up to her graduation because a mysterious person from his past comes to his place and murders him. Dina and Topan go to check on him at the same time, so Dina sees Topan standing over the body, thinks he’s the killer, nicks him with a bullet as he runs, and dedicates her life to tracking him down. So the Big 4 retire and leave town.

Three years later Dina’s an overachieving cop, still working her father’s murder case on the side, and her boss makes her take a vacation. She turns it into work by going to a villa she recognizes from an old photo of her dad – it’s where he raised the Big 4, so they’re all living their new lives nearby, with Topan running the inn. Soon Dina figures out who they are and struggles to come to terms with her father’s secret life and the fact that these trained (by him) killers loved him too.

They’ve all found other stuff to do. Jenggo is a guru, scamming tourists, talking about chakras, making strange teas. Pelor (who never learned to fight) is really proud to now own a gun (gold, like his grill, and his necklace, which holds a gold gun medallion). Alpha works as an off brand Little Mermaid singing at children’s parties, as well as arranging arms deals.

They’ll all fight and they’ll bond and they’ll clash with other equally colorful characters. Their nemesis Antonio Sandoval (Marthino Lio, VENGEANCE IS MINE, ALL OTHERS PAY CASH) is both a formidable opponent and a laughable one. He was trained by Petrus too, so he’s jealous of the Big 4’s relationship with him. He overcompensates by growing a twirly mustache, calling himself “The Scorpion of South East Asia” and “The Prince of 1,000 Knives,” and intimidating people with his salsa dancing. He’s a genuine threat who gets the upper hand repeatedly, so he manages to be scary, even if we laugh at him.

He has a bodyguard named Alo (Michelle Tahalea) who seems deadlier and colder than him. He calls her his secretary, and she looks it in her pantsuit, even while massacring gangsters with throwing knives and a commandeered machete. His other most dangerous lieutenant is Vinsen (Kho Michael, “Club Fighter,” THE RAID 2), who’s the twin brother of a different henchman who died earlier in the movie, and has entrance music that sounds like Indonesian M.O.P.

So there are plenty of worthy fighters for our heroes to have long showdowns with in the finale. Until then, Sandoval has a surplus of guys in kevlar and tactical gear like cops who chase the Big 4 in a convoy of black SUVs so that there are plenty of ringers for them to shoot, stab, kick and explode.

At one point Pelor gets abducted, and there’s a badass group shot of the Big 4 minus one plus Dina, walking together in slow motion as they embark on a rescue mission. It’s set up for a joke, because Topan trips in the middle of the shot and then has to compose himself to look cool again. But it doesn’t ruin it because the funk music keeps going, so it gets a laugh without invalidating my appreciation for the shot just being cool. Imagine the discipline! No record scratch!

The humor is broad and bawdy, sometimes gross. With Alpha’s encouragement, Jenggo’s relationship with Siska literalizes the fetishization of guns, so let’s just say he enjoys himself a little too much when he, uh, puts his finger in “her.” He talks about her like a soulmate he’s been reunited with, and Alo becomes his ultimate enemy by snapping Siska over her knee. But the ol’ girl is able to turn it into martyrdom when Jenggo jams her remains into Alo’s bazooka to cause one of the top 3 deaths in the movie, and it’s all worth it for Jenggo’s anguished cry of “Siska!” (Reminds me of David Koechner in KRAMPUS discovering his SUV has been smashed and yelling, “Lucinda!”)

There are also comic set pieces that could be in a Jackie Chan movie, like early on when Dina thinks Topan is the desk clerk so he answers her questions while hiding that he’s fighting two guys, or later when Jenggo puts the wrong thing in her tea and makes her super high. In the latter case I don’t think Jackie’s performance would be as funny as Marino’s, and the psychedelic effects (animated lizard tongue) wouldn’t be as good.

It reminds me a little of the Hong Kong classics that have those wild tonal shifts from brutal violence to the broadest of buffoonery, but here it never seems jarring to me, I think it’s a pretty natural fusion. The characters and the movie have the same personality. Silly on the surface, sincere on the inside, tough as nails, covered in blood.

Here are three screengrabs I selected to make sure you understand this still showcases the good, grueling martial arts shit:

There are more fights than jokes. Not just quick scraps, but the long, exhausting battles you can rarely get in western movies anymore, because they’re not allowed the time. Two bodies hammering away at each other, collapsing, getting back up, clawing and crawling toward finding that triple exclamation point of a finishing move that will finally end it. (Fight choreographer/stunt coordinator: Muhammad Irfan, HEADSHOT.) Featured weapons include a mop bucket, bows and arrows, blowdarts, a bazooka, a customized bazooka called a Sunburst, a rolled up coat, a flaregun, a chair, various guns and gun handles, throwing axes, a hand towel, an unflushed toilet, a toothbrush, and a bomb that Alpha invented and named “Lucifer’s Fart 3000.” Jenggo says “there’s nothing badass about farts,” but it leaves a bunch of people and vehicles in flames, and turns at least one guy into liquid.

Bullets pierce through walls and floors, battles travel up stairways and down hallways, structures have holes kicked and punched into them, there’s at least one dramatic-knee-slide-while-pulling-out-weapons, and a whole bunch of evasive somersaults. There’s a motorcycle vs. motorcycle taxi chase/shootout. An arrow accidentally knocks a knife off a wall and drops it into a guy’s head. Vinsen swings at Dina and misses, breaking a sink off the wall, so she picks up the sink and breaks it on his skull. A guy gets a hand grenade shoved into his mouth and then he’s drop kicked through a door, and when Alpha realizes his severed arm is holding onto her she calls him a drama queen.

It’s the kind of mayhem that fills my heart and reminds me of what action movies are supposed to be. These are fights that have rhythm and build, set up and payoff, twists and turns. They tell a story, take you on a journey, they’re full of gimmicks and ideas and those little grace notes in between blows, like bumping into a tree during a fight and a bunch of leaves fall down from above, or stumbling into a lamp and knocking it over, or a piece of a handrail gets knocked out by a dodged kick, later to be picked up and used as a bat. And it’s all perfectly in tune with the camera, which seems to be as much a part of the choreography as the fights are. It rotates around combatants without being disorienting, it follows a person over a ledge, or as they’re body slammed to the floor, or will do a quick spin as the POV of a thug shot over a rail, or rotate in sync with a person being flipped. Batara Goempar was second unit d.p. for THE NIGHT COMES FOR US and moved up to Tjahjanto’s cinematographer on MAY THE DEVIL TAKE YOU and PORTALS.

There’s a notion I can’t entirely disagree with that movies these days are too long (“bloated,” they usually say) and that more of them should stick to 90 minutes. Some would even say it’s pretentious for a silly action movie to be much longer than that. I don’t think anybody reasonable would be a total zealot about that, they’d allow exceptions for movies that clearly earn a longer runtime. Still, I want to point out a pretty long action movie that some consider silly: FACE/OFF. It takes its time building to a powerful melodrama (with speedboat chase) and I guarantee you there were people at that studio who would’ve loved to cut 43 minutes off of its 133. Fortunately nobody listened to those bozos.

THE BIG 4 is tonally very different from FACE/OFF, and is even longer at 141 minutes. But rather than making me check my watch it reminds me of how great a thing that can be. I can’t really picture what the more economical and compact version would be like, but it probly wouldn’t leave me with as strong a connection to these characters, and definitely wouldn’t give me the same feeling of having gone through a whole long ordeal with them and seeing them make it through, just barely. In the final battle these new siblings are checking on and encouraging each other, and at the end they’re all limping off, as bloodied as John McClane has ever been, but they’re smiling and patting each other on the back, and it’s exhilarating.

Bring on THE BIG 5, please.