a review of 使徒

HOOPTOBER XII NIGHT TWENTY-FOUR: Another Netflix Original with fairly sumptuous production values that still feels oddly half-baked in its ultimate realization. At first I didn't know if this was a failure of the screenplay itself, or just how it all came out in the edit, but given that director Gareth Evans is credited as being responsible for both, I guess maybe it's a little bit of each? As it is, the movie employs a pretty scattershot approach to depicting religious terror and violence; Evans seemingly wants to show how fundamentalist religion and colonialism work together to create monstrous and oppressive systems, but the message gets cut short by revealing the full supernatural underpinnings much too early in the film, and then not really bothering to develop our understanding of them after that. There's also the issue of the movie's weirdly stylized violence, where (aside from some truly gross torture/execution scenes) Evans shoots all of the fights in the same hyperkinetic gyro-cam martial-arts style that he used in THE RAID movies, with combatants getting thrown against walls and run through with spears from five different directions, with no real grounding in the history or setting. Dan Stevens and Michael Sheen both do fine work here defining their opposing characters with mixtures of extreme zeal and doubt, but they never really get to fully hash out their differences over the course of the film, and ultimately the whole thing just feels a bit hollow.