First and foremost, ‘The Big 4’ is a tale of vengeance. A police officer named Dina (Putri Marino) finds her father killed in their home with only a masked person standing beside his dead body. While she is not aware of who killed him or the reason he got murdered, she gets back to her work and, instead, starts finishing her police duties more diligently. It becomes evident that she has not mourned the death of her father, who was dear to her, and is trying to stay busy not to let herself fall into a whirlwind of emotions. Maybe, it is a way for her to gain control over her life. However, upon getting a chance to find the culprits, she decides to process her grief in a different way. What awaits her is a wild & deranged ride of action adventure.
Much of the following film depends heavily on her efforts to capture her father’s killers while learning about the people she meets every step of the way. From staying at a dingy motel in a small town to getting high on some sort of strange drugs shared by a local, self-proclaimed guru, she goes on an outlandish trip in this land with the hopes of fulfilling her mission. She does not fall in love with this adventure from the get-go and struggles to make peace with it. However, her resolve is so strong that it makes her commit to the big picture at the end of this journey of hers.
The script is rudimentary in its depiction of the subject of vengeance and in its showcase of a gang getting back together for a mission they all believe in. On her journey through this land, Dina stumbles upon different people to learn that all of them are her siblings. Her father had adopted many children, four of which turned to become assassins. Due to his sense of guilt for his profession and her being on the other side of the law, he does not reveal to her openly what he does for a living. She has a hint of his ‘job profile’ being risk-averse, but not to the extent that someone would want him killed. Nevertheless, these four siblings become her ‘Big 4’ who help her avenge the culprits.
On their journey together, they get over their differences in their mutual love for their father. They see him as the torch leading them to fight these evil parts of society. The story, occasionally sentimental, has nothing to do with morality and more with presenting entertainment for the sake of it. It is also one of those films where you must love how it is presented to appreciate it to the fullest. If you are even a tad bit averse to it, it may not work as well for you solely with its entertainment quotient. Besides, the plot is predictable for the most part, which makes it rely heavily on storytelling devices to engage its viewers with a constant overload of action.
This gangster action film, directed by Timo Tjahjanto, fuses the elements of comedy and crime to present an overtly wacky narration of Dina’s quest with her compadres. The screenplay is written by the director himself along with Johanna Wattimena, which spends too much time on the initial build-up towards the stage of the gang of assassins getting together after their retirement. The characters do not develop nearly enough, and the film’s watchability depends on how its action sequences are directed or the set pieces are organized. In both these departments, this movie does a commendable job.
The heightened, indulgent style of storytelling works incredibly well at times and, at others, unnecessarily stretches some of the script’s irrelevant bits for its own amusement. There is a sense of gratuitous pleasure in these shenanigans that leaves a long part of this Indonesian film on Netflix to become annoying in a childlike manner. If that was the intention behind this movie’s production, then maybe it is a compliment to the makers. Nevertheless, its concoction of a gangster action flick with loud comic moments does not translate into a piece of work worth revisiting.
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The Big 4 (2022) Netflix Movie Trailer
The Big 4 (2022) Netflix Movie Links: IMDb Rotten Tomatoes
The Big 4 (2022) Netflix Movie Cast: Putri Marino, Abimana Aryasatya, Lutesha
