FEBRUARY 11 — If you’re an avid fan of action films, you’ll know that there’s a noticeable difference between the style of filmmaking and storytelling in each era in the rich history of action cinema.
The reasons can vary, but in general these differences can be traced to two main factors — time and geography. An 80s action film will almost surely not resemble one from the 1970s or the 2000s.
Similarly, an American action film from 1988 will very probably not resemble a Hong Kong or Taiwanese action film from the same year.
And even for American action films, the same decade can yield very different styles of filmmaking once a certain style becomes a new fad, like how shaky cam became prevalent (even in Bond movies!) after the Bourne films became big hits and how close quarters hand to hand combat became the new thing after the first John Wick film became a huge sleeper hit.
Whatever your favourite type of action film may be, I think it’s safe to say that all action fans have a soft spot for the simple pleasures of 80s action films and all those low-budget straight to video 80s and early 90s action flicks.
I mean, who doesn’t like a bit of Chuck Norris, Arnold, Stallone, Steven Seagal and Van Damme in their action movies?
Even though they really don’t make them like that anymore in Hollywood, if you look closer at the lower budget scale of action filmmaking, you’ll find that they still make them like that sometimes.
Whether it’s intentional or not is for another discussion, but if 80s/90s action is something that’s up your alley, you’ll find a lot to like in Coast Guard Malaysia: Ops Helang.
It’s almost impossible to write about this Malaysian film without talking about the tragic loss of the movie’s director, Pitt Haniff, who drowned just two days after the movie finished production.
Having met him on set quite a few times before (before directing this as his debut feature, he’s done tonnes of assistant-directing jobs on all sorts of productions), and knowing what a great guy he was, of course I just had to go see this one in the cinema at the very least as a show of respect to a fellow industry professional.
But I was definitely not prepared for how ridiculously entertaining this movie turned out to be. Even when compared to previous local enforcement agency movies like Paskal: The Movie and Air Force The Movie: Selagi Bernyawa, this one trumps all of them (except for Polis Evo 2, which for me remains the benchmark for local tactical action movies) by virtue of being one of the most fast-paced, maybe even impatiently paced, movies I’ve ever seen to come out of Malaysia.
Playing almost like a series of action scenes and tactical attacks hung on the barest of plot clotheslines, with an almost ruthless approach to excising out unimportant, and sometimes even important, bits of exposition, the audience will not mind the missing bits of connecting tissues that sometimes appear in the narrative because we’re treated to a never-ending onslaught of shootings, fights and explosions.
Even more impressively, they really did blow things up for real here, and in-camera, hence the reportedly RM13 million budget, so there’s no need to contend with annoying and fake-looking CGI flames or explosions.
If you saw a boat being blown up here while there’s a helicopter in the air nearby, then that’s what they did to get that shot. If you saw a small village being blown to pieces, then that’s what happened in front of the cameras.
Now I don’t know about you, but when I walk in to see an action film, I’m there for the action because that’s where the artistry of this genre of film lies.
As long as the plot/narrative doesn’t go against the logic set up by the film’s world-building and does enough to enable me to follow the story from point A to point B all the way to the end, then you won’t find me complaining about narrative logic or depth of character.
The screenplay here by Jason Chong, Tommy Loh and Puovin Sandera does all these basic things neatly — it gives us clearly defined heroes and villains, including one of the most ruthlessly fun villains I’ve seen in modern Malaysian movies (played to perfection by Adlin Aman Ramlie), provides believable motives for the respective parties, and most surprisingly, ambushes the audience with plenty of plot twists throughout the film.
So, there’s still plenty to keep the audience on their toes, plot-wise, but make no mistake, this is one of those films where the thrills are visceral, not cerebral, and that’s not a bad thing.
And even though this is a pretty high budget film by Malaysian standards, with the current success that the film’s enjoying in terms of box-office takings and word-of-mouth hype, I think more people have begun to realise that a high budget epic film doesn’t necessarily need to be of the high-brow variety to be considered a good film, because an epic piece of high budget low-brow action madness like this can also be one too.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
