Merantau (2009)

It is well-known that Indonesia has a strong martial arts tradition. The most famous fighting style is Pencak Silat, which is a collection of various techniques. With Merantau director Gareth Evans shows that Pencak Silat is a good choice to use for this martial arts film. Merantau is the result. When a boy has to become a man there is a tradition in Indonesia that he leaves his parents to search for life experience and become succesful before he returns home again. This is called Merantau. Can this movie compete with other martial arts movies made in China and Thailand?

Iko Uwais is Yuda, a young man who travels to Jakarta to find his success before he can return home to see his mother. When he arrives at the address where he would be staying he finds out that the building doesn’t exist anymore and he has nowhere to stay. He is forced to sleep in some pipes at an empty construction site. When he is searching for a job his bag is stolen en he sees how a girl is being beaten in an alley. He decides to stand up for her, but doesn’t know what he gets himself into as it doesn’t take long for him to become entangled in a web of human traffickers.

The story starts out strong, but as often is the case with these type of movies it isn’t its strongest point. You watch these films for their fights and Merantau delivers it. The fights are quick and have often been shot from a limited number of angles. The cuts between these viewpoints are slow, which I liked a lot. Usually there is a lot of fast editing when fights are shown in movies. This results in a focus on the fights themselves which are fast and exciting to watch.

Although the story isn’t the best part, it is different from what you’d expect. Especially the ending was unexpected, but in a good way.
The only flaw of this movie were the European bad guys as they didn’t act very well and their English wasn’t very good either. They really lowered the quality of the film and I think it would have been better if these characters would have been played by Indonesian actors.
Despite this Merantau has a lot of action and spectacle to entertain. If you are looking for a great martial arts movie then you can’t go wrong with Merantau.