An onscreen brawl takes over the movie just before the halfway point and lasts for almost an hour in “Walid,” a Malaysian thriller about child trafficking and the burly teacher who decides to beat his way through all manner of villains to free a little girl he just met.

The Malay martial art Silat is put on great display, although you’d have to be an aficionado to discern a “style” through all these beat-downs, clubbings, stabbings and shootings. Still, an hour-long fight is something to brag about and the chief selling point in this confused, confusing and clumsily-slow-until-the-big-fight action picture.

Megat Sharizal has the title role. This much is clear. He is a teacher of small children in an open air school somewhere in the provinces. He takes an interest. And when he sees a threat, he takes the time to take off his glasses before he takes care of business.

Putri Qaseh plays Aisha, “an immigrant,” the locals call her, someone discriminated against, unwanted and thus vulnerable in this corner of Asia, where child trafficking — as depicted here — is a going concern.

Director and co-writer Areel Abu Bakar packs a lot of villains on the screen, leaving most of them unidentified — creep with the cowboy bat, perve with the lollipop, hothead with the ever-present illegal cigarette and middle men in service of some cocky older operator, also in a hat.

There are also unnamed — at least as far as the film’s inept subtitling tells us — cops fighting the kidnappers and not shy about mixing it up with them when they think they’ve got this or that trafficker cornered.

But the film’s first fight, the one that gives you hope this could be exciting, violently satisfying or at least a bit different, is instigated by Aisha’s mom, played by veteran Malay star Feiyna Tajudin. She’s doing laundry by hand, a Muslim woman barking at the creepy men she sees hanging around the school and her kid, when next thing we know, she’s beating the hell out of three of them with just the soggy clothes she has in her basket.

The epic throw down that consumes most of the film has nothing as furious and funny as this bit of business. As the first act is mostly bits of brooding, teaching kids to read and to recite the country’s oath, and scenes of price-haggling/child-trafficking bad guys, it takes patience to get to that second, third and never-seems-to-end final brawl.

The acting isn’t bad, but like the fight choreography, it’s of uneven quality.

There’s an odd voice-over of a speech or something by a figure Malay viewers may recognize laying out the stakes for their country and its problems, and it’s “make sure we don’t lose our country” (in Malay with subtitles) messaging suggests it could be xenophobic immigrant bashing, too, something the film takes a stand against.

On the whole, “Walid” is messy in a conventional sense and alien to a Western viewer in its storytelling style. I’ve seen a number of Malaysian films on Netflix in recent years, and I guess the streaming service makes it a point to order or acquire movies with a more Westernized storytelling style.

The fights, at least, need no explaining or translating.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, child trafficking, smoking

Cast: Megat Sharizal, Putri Qaseh, Namron, Yusran Hashim, Sham Putra and Feiyna Tajudin

Credits: Directed by Areel Abu Bakar, scripted by Areel Abu Bakar and Hafiz Derani. An Outsider release.

Running time: 1:50