"The Raid: Redemption" Review: 101 Minutes of Sustained Damage

Have you ever wondered what "Die Hard" would be like if John McClane knew how to roundhouse-kick people in the face and disarm bloodthirsty, machete-wielding henchmen? If so, "The Raid: Redemption" is your answer.

The setup is almost aggressively simple, and that's the point. A twenty-man elite squad rolls up on a run-down high-rise in the slums of Jakarta. The building belongs to crime lord Tama Riyadi (Ray Sahetapy), who has spent a decade renting rooms and protection to every criminal who needs a place to disappear. Tama has a lieutenant, Andi (Donny Alamsyah), and an enforcer called Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian), and once the squad's cover is blown, the power is cut, and the exits are sealed. Our man is Rama (Iko Uwais), a rookie with a pregnant wife at home. Fifteen floors up. No backup coming. That's the whole movie, and it's more than enough.

The Fights

What sells "The Raid," and what we are here to see, are the incredible fist-pumping fight scenes everyone's been gushing over. You will be left slack-jawed. Every once in a while, a new filmmaker comes along and turns a genre upside down. Writer-director Gareth Evans has just opened a new floodgate for action films using the innovative Indonesian martial art Pencak Silat, which consists of controlled body movements and literally means "to fight artfully".

Evans and Iko Uwais collaborate for a second time, combining 'Silat' in the most claustrophobic areas of a broken-down building with knives, guns and pretty much any weapon that's likely to give you tetanus. Imagine you're at the dead end of a skinny hallway empty-handed, and a handful of goons are coming at you with dirty machetes. Your only choice is to use your surroundings and adapt or die. Kill or be killed.

Uwais and his choreography team construct these fights in an unbelievably violent, raw, and exciting manner; at the same time, Evans uses the camera like an invisible person, just there watching the mayhem as it happens. Every long take and shot is impressive, and Uwais, as the lead, has the heart and passion of a young Bruce Lee. He was born to be an action star.

How This Movie Even Exists

Here's the part that makes the whole thing more impressive. Evans is Welsh. He moved to Indonesia to work on a documentary about Pencak Silat, got hooked on the art form, and met a young practitioner named Iko Uwais who was working as a delivery driver in Jakarta at the time. He put him in "Merantau" in 2009, and the two of them started planning something much bigger: a sprawling prison crime saga called "Berandal."

Then the money fell through. Over a year of development, a teaser shot, and no funding. So Evans took the ambition, shrank it down to one building and one very bad night, and made that instead.

The budget came in around $1.1 million. It grossed roughly $9.3 million worldwide. Evans wrote, directed, and edited it himself. And the crime saga he had to shelve? That will become "The Raid 2" or something like that; I am sure of this. Sometimes running out of money is the best thing that can happen to a filmmaker.

The Camera Is Not Cheating

Pay attention to what Evans refuses to do here, because it's the difference between this and every shaky-cam mess Hollywood has been feeding us.

He doesn't undercrank. He doesn't drop frames in the edit to fake a speed he didn't capture. What you see is what the performers actually did, at the speed they actually did it. The only trick in the bag is a mix of fast and slow motion applied at the exact moment of impact, on hands, feet, elbows, joints, purely to make you feel the hit land. That's it.

This is why the long takes matter so much. You can hold a shot when your actors can genuinely do the thing. You cut every eight frames when they can't.

Rama Is Not a Superhero

The other thing "The Raid" gets right, and it's easy to miss under all the noise, is that Rama can lose.

We are so trained on heroes who wade through forty guys and walk out with a torn shirt and a nosebleed. Rama knows Silat. So does everybody else in this building. When he and Andi finally take on Mad Dog, it takes both of them, and even then it's ugly and close, and it costs them. Two men against one, and it's still barely enough.

That single choice is what gives the violence weight. Every fight in the movie carries the possibility that this is the one where he doesn't get up.

One Small Note on the Score

Worth knowing before you press play: this film has two versions of its music. The original Indonesian release is scored by Fajar Yuskemal and Aria Prayogi. The international cut, the one most people saw, was rescored by Mike Shinoda and Joseph Trapanese. Both work, but they push the movie in slightly different directions. If you've only ever seen one, the other is worth tracking down.

The Verdict

My only complaint about "The Raid" is that it ended. Good thing this is Part 1 of a trilogy.