Review: The Raid: Redemption

daniel cohen gears up for the raid…

Plot: When a SWAT team invades a run down apartment complex to take down a ruthless crime lord (Ray Sahetapy), the tables are turned when they become locked inside as a bloody war breaks out between the tenants of the building and the police.

While this is an intense and absolutely brutal piece of filmmaking, I’m surprised I didn’t come away liking this more. Don’t get me wrong…this is a thoroughly entertaining movie, but it’s just short of great. I’ll say this though: If you like violence in your movies, go buy your ticket right now.

The plot is pretty straightforward: a SWAT team enters an almost impenetrable building where the most ruthless crime lord of Jakarta is perched up on the top floor with TV monitors everywhere like he’s the fricking Riddler. You can tell from the first few seconds of watching these guys prep in the SWAT van that they are shitting their pants.

A huge weakness with this movie is that it’s ridiculously cliché and predictable. Gee, I wonder if one of the cops will be tougher then the rest. Oh wait, does that cop have a pregnant wife at home … yup. But I don’t mind these clichés, because the film makes it work, and really makes you care about the protagonist Rama, played by Iko Uwais.

Aside from the fighting, which I’ll get to in a minute, what really works about this movie is the environment. This apartment building is just an absolute shit hole. Seriously, this is where Jabba the Hutt would live if he was poor. It adds brilliantly to the action and terrible predicament these guys are in because the building is just so dirty and evil looking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkULMOFpuCo

But let’s get to the soul of this film: the fighting. One of the biggest problems I have with this movie is that the first third is pretty much just gun fights. While the gun fights are nice, you know the hand-to-hand stuff is coming, but it takes to long to get there. But once we actually get to the fighting … oh, baby.

The real genius of the martial arts scenes is that they are clearly exaggerated, yet still feel realistic. That’s what makes them so vicious to watch. There are people getting their heads slammed into metal, floors, wooden walls, pipes…I could almost feel the pain coming off the screen. This is the type of stuff that would make hockey players cry. And even though a movie like Kill Bill is 500 times more bloody and gruesome, this was way more brutal because the violence in Kill Bill was a cartoon…this feels raw.

The last fight in particular is just pure insanity. The music ramps up at the perfect intervals, which really adds another level to it.

There is also plenty of great tension throughout the film. There’s one moment where Rama is hiding in between the walls with an injured cop as the bad guys try and detect where they are. It was gut-wrenching.

But even with all my compliments, the movie was just missing something. The pacing for example wasn’t great. As I said, it takes a long time to ramp up. And as much as I loved all the fights, I wish I cared about the villains more. The bad guys in this are pretty ‘meh,’ and a film like this really needed a more intriguing baddie. You got the main crime lord, Tama (Ray Sahetapy), and the ruthless henchman, Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian). These guys were pretty bland. And one of them is named Mad Dog, for crying out loud! Come on!

I was absolutely thrilled with the action and hard core nature of these fight scenes, but I just wish I cared more about what was going on. Everything surrounding the action may have been mediocre, but the fighting was so compelling, I can’t help but highly recommend it.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10 (Very Good)