And while other brutal melee movies hit the video stores almost every week, the plans for this film are different. They seemed to see the potential, as well. In this film, the fight for survival isn't an elegant ballet in slow motion but a captivating tour de force, a close combat battle where every measure is justified.Īfter Hollywood noticed that little movie, they didn't hesitate to acquire the rights. The repertoire includes punching, shooting, stabbing and bone breaking with reliable regularity. He too chooses actions that cause the viewer to raise his eyebrow once in a while. While fighting his enemies, our hero is surely no angel that hovers over their apparent barbarity. The conflicts are dirty and gritty, the actions nasty. Here, nothing gets toned down by a cool oneliner, no CGI overkill waters down the action or an act of heroic pathos saves the day in the last second. When The Expendables has the big names and the cool basic idea, The Raid has the guts to bring the goods to the table. The Raid however proves that the opposite is possible. And even then, a catchy title or fancy artwork is mostly the thing that attracts the common video store visitors. An action film originating from Indonesia normally gets lucky when an international distributor picks up the rights and releases it on the big markets.
#WATCH THE RAID REDEMPTION MOVIE#
Films that are not manufactured in the States or other heartlands of movie productions and therefore don't get the media treatment from day 1, rely heavily on word-of-mouth advertising. Subscribe to the Stream On Demand weekly newsletter (your E-mail address will not be shared) and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.The Raid is an exception in many aspects. Availability may vary by service.ĭon’t miss a single recommendation. Rated R, in Indonesian with English subtitlesĪlso on Blu-ray and DVD and on SVOD through Amazon Video, iTunes, GooglePlay and/or other services. The cynicism of this vision seems born of real anger. Either way, this impressive display of hard-edged martial action and bare-knuckle direction is not something you can just toss off when it’s over. Or maybe I’m just taking it all too seriously. You can argue the film is simply calculated exploitation as a stunning spectacle, but there is also something in its sober, serious attitude that gives the film a twisted authenticity as a sour social commentary on life in Jakarta.
The American title is almost a joke: there’s no redemption here, merely survival. The backstory makes the police raid even more meaningless and it’s a fine line as to whether the film is hard-heartedly cynical or a statement of the cynicism of a thoroughly corrupt culture. Stars Iko Uwais (our upstanding hero, who has a pregnant wife at home but won’t give up on his comrades), Joe Taslim (the stalwart team leader), and Yayan Ruhian (the berserker building enforcer, appropriately named Mad Dog) are all martial arts professionals and serve as fight choreographers on the film, giving it an impressive variety of moves. The Raid: Redemption has the choreography of the grittiest gangster thrillers from the Hong Kong action heyday of the nineties and the whiplash moves of Sammo Hung (in his prime) and Tony Jaa, but it ups the ante on the brutality and culture of corruption. You may wince so hard that you end up with sympathy bruises. Survival in this film is as much a matter of endurance as skill: these guys take beating after beating and get back up for the next round. When the cops enter, the kingpin offers a reward to any inhabitant who takes out the intruders. Set almost entirely in an apartment building in the slums of Jakarta, the extreme action film The Raid: Redemption (Indonesia, 2011) has a reputation as one of the fiercest, most brutal crime thrillers around.ĭirected by Gareth Huw Evans, a Brit (actually Welsh) in Asia, and starring martial arts professionals in the lead roles, this is a meeting of Western and Eastern action cinema, a savage portrait of cops and crooks in a culture of criminal Darwinism built on a ruthlessly simple plot and a fiercely stripped-down style.Ī strike force is sent in to an apartment building populated by criminals and protected by the kind of arrogant underworld kingpin that populate such movies.
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