This Indonesian action film unfolds a story as old as time, or at least as old as film noir, in which a bad man (the undeniably charismatic Iko Uwais) experiences a trauma so severe (shot in the head, thrown into the sea) he wakes up with amnesia and somehow a completely different personality (which seems unlikely from a neurological point of view). Nerdy-cute medic Ailin (Chelsea Islan) nurses him back to health in the hospital and names him Ishmael after the narrator of Moby-Dick, which she happens to be reading at the time.
The film-making owes far less to any literary antecedents than it does to the kind of ultra-violent, stylish action films made in Hong Kong and Korea. As such, it’s a very good iteration of the genre, with moody lighting, razor sharp editing and great fight sequences, but be advised that only the strongest of stomachs need apply: it is excessively gory and amoral, even by the standards of such fare, with lots of blood-letting, eye-gouging and murder achieved with assorted implements of destruction including, at one point, a chopstick to the head.
