A Guest Review by Mogi (Rage)

I have been initially skeptical with the poster.

So, it has been a long while since we have another patriotic movie in the form of army movie. We do have some before, the likes of Leftenan Adnan, Bukit Kepong, Sarjan Hassan, Darah Satria, and many more that I haven’t encountered; they may exist…or maybe not. Anyway, this new movie is meant to showcase the struggle of our army in defending our country and for patriotism.

They did mention that this film is also based on a true story. BUT. From the looks of it, I have my doubts. This adds a whole new level of, I quote Hassan Mutalib “F*****G BS”.

Overall? IT FAILED BEYOND BELIEF.

The summary is dastardly simple.

It’s basically ‘The Lone Survivor’ localized; two Malays, one Indian, one Chinese, and one Sarawakian in the Bravo 5 movie. They were tasked to rescue this one Malay soldier from the Communists, and somehow they screwed up big time. In the end…well, why do you think I likened this movie to ‘The Lone Survivor’?

Why does the movie suck to me, you ask?

The movie background is set around 1989 I believe; I’m shocked that Communists are still wandering around and that they are still our greatest enemy at the time. Isn’t that like, the 60’s 70’s problem?

At the start of the film, the characters are established. We have Remy Ishak, a man who left his newly wedded wife because he is needed (get this) by the country. Oh, the wife is played by Siti Saleha, whose role is just… as a wife, and i’ll tell you the other part later. Then we have the Chinese guy, then the Indian, and then the… who is this guy, they obscure the face because he was in a sniping position, then it transitioned to a room where he is presented as a silhouette and we STILL can’t tell who he is. Next, we get cut to Beto’s character, and I was mistaking him as the same character but apparently it isn’t. It’s only until the show all 5 of them Bravo guys, I realized oh they have this Sarawak fella. Where the hell does he come from?

The most baffling thing I’ve seen in this movie is that the communists went HAIL HYDRA pose (the exact damn pose) while shouting MAO ZEDONG. Really, is this what the communists do their salute? Mao Zedong is miles away in China, and Communism doesn’t mean refer to Mao Zedong is the great leader, there’s f******g Russia, f*****g Stalin man.

The cinematography is awful. The camerawork is like, what is its purpose? It’s like the cinematographer had just kept moving the camera to make it alive than static, but he kept dollying around left and right until the shots are all meaningless. The camerawork is a character. It plays a narrative role; but in this film, it doesn’t! Sometimes the soldiers went into the jungle, and for no bloody reason the shot changes from daytime to nighttime. You can tell the difference by the lighting. It’s an awful lot more when they shoot everything in the dark, pitch black, no rim light silhouette and such, this film is so black, its blacker than my coffee, i can’t see shit captain! When they have a shootout scene, it was so dark I can’t tell who shoot whom, who died, what the hell happened here?

Character-wise, not that great. We have Siti Saleha here who ends up getting raped and died. That’s it, that’s her character. The Indian fella has this father, on every f*****g shot he’s in, he always CRY. Then we have this father of Remy, who talks to his kampung friends how sucky the communists are; like it was a forced message and for what purpose? Their forced message conversation acting sucks so bad. During the raping incident, the father managed to intervene against the communists, and he wallop a couple of karate chops at the three of them, I could hear a movie goer shouting, why didn’t the communists just shoot the fella? And he did, he gets shot in the head, after whacking several people in the first run. The Bravo 5 movie shares their stories but I feel its so underdeveloped. The bad guys however are pretty cheesy, especially if one would compare them to the Bukit Kepong movie that was filmed back in the 80’s. These guys made more convincing Communists than this one. MAO ZEDONG? What the hell man?

Plot holes, scenes that doesn’t make any sense at all. For example, when the father stomps the floor (for god knows what reason!), the filmmakers had even made the effect more prominent. Why?

The fighting scenes? They kept playing this ramping 300 slow motion shit to the point it’s annoying. The camera kept moving and shaking around; even with the quick editing it doesn’t make the scenes any better. To me that had probably made it way worse. I can’t tell what’s going on as well. Haven’t they learn what Jackie Chan or Donnie Yen rules of fighting scenes? KEEP IT SIMPLE. This film isn’t. It’s a cluttered mess of shit.

The gore is bad. You see this guy covered in blood. Oh, it’s so painted red like it covers the whole body with red paint. It’s so obvious that it’s paint because it doesn’t look like blood at all. It’s so red, I doubt that the color code in Photoshop can even comply to such colors. There is also a moment where we see bodies of dead communists, where at this one instance they had just Photoshop’ed blood or bullet holes on a person…and it’s clearly obvious that they’re Photoshop’ed!

The film climax pits against the last character against the last communists (he he he). So they have a fight scene hand to hand combat (and awful too) only at the last minute the last dude gets a deus ex machina from… suddenly appearing trap who impales the final villain. Where the f**k does that come from again? Where’s the establishment of that. True story my ass, what a sheer coincidence they ran to this situation by sheer luck.

The forced message in this film just doesn’t make me felt patriotic even, it made me feel moronic.

My ratings for this film? How about a big F**K YOU for wasting my f**king money you fuck.

And to the people who gave it a good rating and say its the best film, F**K YOU too.
You are the scum who made the industry worst. You’re not honest, you’re a lowly shit.

I rate this movie –5/10 overall.