Pirate brothers.

Mortal Enemies is a really stupid name for a film, but it’s not as stupid as the film’s original title. Pirate Brothers. But that’s okay, because it’s not as stupid as the names of the two heroes; Sunny and Verdy. I know I’m kinda nitpicking early but I can’t help but focus in how crappy of a title Mortal Enemies is especially for this film. And I just watched like a dozen films called Blood Money in a row.

Directed by Asun Mawardi who you may recognize from 2020’s Once Upon a Time in Indonesia, Mortal Enemies was written by Matthew Ryan Fischer whose top rated film at 5.8 is Mortal Enemies. Fischer also wrote that godawful King of Fighters 2009 flick. I’ll share the Spoony review because it’s better than the film. It’s also the solo writing credit of Douglas Galt who then never worked in this town again.

The film stars stars Robin Shou as Sunny, an ex-orphan turned pirate who is really good at the martial arts. His “brother” Verdy is played by Verdy Bhawanta, presumably so the actor knew when people were talking to him on set. Robin Shou is listed as still active in acting even though he hasn’t had an IMDB credited role in about 9 years. You’ll remember him as Liu Kang in the old Mortal Kombat movies. Maybe that’s why they changed this film to Mortal Enemies.

While Verdy goes on to become a hotshot businessman, Sunny grows up like most orphans and becomes a hardened criminal. The two end up on opposite sides of a power struggle, which is where the title Mortal Enemies comes from. Can Sunny and Verdy rekindle their childhood brotherhood and fight together to take down the bad guys? Yeah, I hope so. This isn’t one of those movies.

Mortal Enemies is a hard movie to love. I can appreciate the amount of time spent in the buildup. It would have been too easy to put their childhood as sporadic flashbacks and a lot of these films just have a “trust us bro” approach to showing that the main characters are close. This takes us through their trauma as kids and why they ended up where they were. There is a lot of martial arts schlock to this film, specifically in a scene where the characters fight in a room full of tables with glass tops specifically so our heroes can repeatedly throw bad guys through them. I’m not opposed to cliches as long as they’re exciting, and I did enjoy the cliched martial arts stuff in this film even if the cliched plot wasn’t good.

On the other hand, while Robin Shou is definitely in better shape than I’ll ever be, at the start of the film he was in his early 50s. Verdy Bhawanta was in his early 30s. You’re really pushing the limits of believability on these two being “brothers” in the same orphanage. Having Verdy in the same sequences does show how much Shou has slowed down over the years with his age. It’s very obvious that they’re futzing with the speed of the fights making them look a tad in fast-forward. You really need to have the right tone for that to work, and this isn’t it.

The story itself is crap and dumb, and you know from the moment we get the plot about Sunny’s brother being murdered and seeing the kid who kills him that he’s inexplicably going to pop up as the main bad guy. That doesn’t even qualify as a spoiler in my opinion, because you know it immediately. Chekhov’s convenience. It’s also awkward having the actors constantly swap between English and it looks like Indonesian. It’s awkward.

Should you watch Mortal Enemies? Sure. Set aside an hour and forty eight minutes of your time and maybe have it on as a background movie though, but you will need to read the subtitles. Don’t put it too high on your list. It was really hard getting screenshots from the trailer.

Rating: C+