Cult classics generally don’t happen on purpose and they usually don’t happen in just 10 days, either. Sam Raimi shot “Evil Dead” on a budget that would’ve paid for only half a shoestring back in 1981; Oliver Benjamin founded Dudeism, a religion inspired by the Coen Brothers’ “The Big Lebowski,” in 2005, 7 years after the film premiered; SNL’s “MacGyver” parody, “MacGruber,” crashed and burned at the box office and with critics in 2010 then rose from the ashes over the following decade, embraced as the masterpiece that it is. So take the cult trappings of “Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash,” the new film from Indonesian arthouse auteur Edwin, well-salted. Cult it is not.
READ MORE: Toronto Film Fest 2021 Preview: 16 Must-See Movies To Watch
It isn’t bad, either. In fact, had Edwin taken the movie in one of two different directions — “more” or “less” — he might’ve actually had the makings of a future cult picture on his hands. If you want to make a martial arts movie, make a martial arts movie; if you want to tread on Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s turf, do it. “Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash” doesn’t stumble because Edwin tries to do both but because his movie doesn’t settle on one or the other as its guiding star. It’s neither enough of an homage to Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan nor enough of a surrealist ghost story about how a country’s past will always haunt its present. Edwin declines to make a choice between idiosyncrasy and action, and his work winds up feeling like a loosely related assembly of material instead of a finished film.
READ MORE: Fall 2021 Movie Preview: 60+ Must-See Films
Knowing when to go for broke with beatdowns and when to let inner weirdness take the wheel is an essential skill for genre-blending. “Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash” doesn’t get there, but at least the scenes Edwin has sutured together work on individual terms, and if he’s sans a compass, he at least has a running gag about dicks to provide the story with a throughline. Ajo Kawir (Marthino Lio), a brawler for hire and incorrigible punk-ass for free, swaggers through his hometown of Bojongsoang, taking on all comers mano-a-mano and often winning. He’s afraid of no man, and a helpful piece of animated graffiti art splashed across a pickup truck’s liftgate explains why: “Only a man who can’t get it up, can face death without fear.”
READ MORE: The Best Films Of 2021, So Far
If you can’t rise to the occasion, then what do you have to lose? Ajo tries to cure his ED, of course, but to no avail. Edwin keeps this impish jape going for most of “Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash”s running time, and even when he may not mean to make a dick joke, he makes it anyway; try watching geoducks squirting water out of their necks without playing image association games between clams and the male member. The film isn’t about Ajo’s quest for an erection, though. It’s about love. On a job intimidating one of the worst scumbags in his burg, Ajo gets brick-walled by Iteung (Ladya Cheryl), said scumbag’s bodyguard. They cross fists, and also knees and legs, and while Ajo prevails, his heart starts a-thumping for Iteung and her ferocious hurricanrana, and even though Ajo’s junk doesn’t work, Iteung gets the hots for him and his vicious right hook.
The pair makes it work. There is no meet-cute in the annals of romantic comedy that’s quite so mismatched to the intention, but when it comes to amour, Edwin knows what he’s doing. “Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash” hits its best notes with Ajo and Iteung’s budding relationship, cast against Indonesian crime, punishment, and bloody history, including the rape of a widow serving as one of the film’s many recurring motifs. Another credit in Edwin’s favor is how well he and his team shoot fight scenes, and with the focus on Ajo and Iteung, fight scenes are bound to happen; more would be welcome given Edwin’s facility with capturing each strike and each blow, alongside the aftermath of each strike and each blow. Modern action films forget that it’s equally as important to properly frame action as reaction. The former is just one-half of a fight sequence’s story. The latter is the other half.
“Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash” lets the audience experience the movement and the impact in each scuffle, so the proportional lack of fights in relation to duration is noticeable. The film clocks in at just shy of 2 hours. That’s a lot of plot and a surprising dearth of ass-whipping, which feels like a letdown when the ass-whippings are staged this cleanly. Edwin swaps out violence with supernatural oddities when the narrative calls for it. The oddities aren’t unwelcome, per se, and offer transporting pleasures of their own. Ghosts make fine guests; expecting “Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash” to exorcise them is asking Edwin to make a movie other than the one he wants to make, which would be obnoxious.
The problem is the film’s indecision over when to invoke the spirits and when to let the characters punch each other. At times, a punch is necessary, at others a ghost. (At others still: A dick joke.) “Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash” waffles over when the time’s right for one over the other, and the sagging effect of that hesitation holds the film back. Finding the right moment for the unexpected is an essential skill; even a realist like Jia Zhangke knows when to drop UFOs in his films. Still, cult movies aren’t cult movies if they’re done by design. That’s just affectation. Edwin’s experiment with folding genre into dreamy arthouse cinema doesn’t fully pan out — but it isn’t a failure, either. [C+]
Follow along with our full coverage from the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival here.