Review: 'The Raid: Redemption'

Film: The Raid: Redemption
Director: Gareth Evans
Cast: Iko Uwais, Ray Sahetapy, Pierre Gruno, Joe Taslim
Rating: ****

The Raid: Redemption is a crime-based Indonesian action film originally called Serbuan Maut. The film straightforwardly focuses on an operation carried out by an Indonesian special forces team in a squalid 30-floor building in the heart of Jakarta’s slums.

Run by a psychotic crimelord Tama Riyadh (Sahetapy), the building is the Sodom of the city, housing every breed of degenerate. Summoned, on cryptic and dubious grounds by Lieutenant Wahyu (Gruno), the 20-member team is led by the earnest sergeant Jaka (Taslim).

Unfortunately, they quickly learn that their clandestine operation has led them to a death trap. As his brothers in arms are moved down by machinegun fire, it’s up to our hero, the disciplined Rama (Uwais) to take on the thugs. But apart from scores of weapon-wielding button men, in the building are also Tama’s brains, the devious Andi, a drug and his muscles the ruthless Mad Dog, a master exponent of Silat, an Indonesian martial art.

The Raid: Redemption is a tour de force of choreographed chaos. The film’s awesomeness is only exceeded by its astronomical body count. Who knew an innocuous piece of architecture could double as an instrument of death? Not for the squeamish, there is rampant defenestration, a hatchet to the face, and slice-happy machetes and balconies that serve as spinebreakers. The closed nature of the setting lends a claustrophobic vibe especially in a hair-raising scene – one of the few involving genuine build-up of suspense-where Rama and an injured colleague are hiding behind a room’s secret partition which is being prodded by a machete.

The Raid is the kind of movie which is short on story. (Though, if one has to, one can salvage a commentary on police corruption and the binding ties of family).  What is high on is, however, is frenzied, frenetic action and abounding martial arts madness.

The cinematography and editing captures the urgency of the stunts and their visceral effect. Uwais and Yayan Ruhian, who figured out the choreography behind the clobbering, deserve credit for contributing to the film’s overall ‘hard-hitting’ nature.

Sahetapy plays a good villain in contrast to Uwais’s vanilla upright, father-to-be act. Holed away, when he is constantly monitoring CCTV footage, one can’t help but think that Intel co-founder Andrew Grove’s maxim ‘Only the paranoid survive,’ is a view he undoubted subscribes to.

Raid: Redemption is a film to watch unless on-screen blood-letting, lightening-fast displays of marital arts prowess and medium-scale destruction aren’t your ideal diversion. Action fans shouldn’t sit this one out.