3 gibbles out of 5

Director: Gareth Evans

“The Raid” has been promoted as one of the most amazing action films of all time.  While there are some successful moments that make your eyes bug out, it cannot maintain its imaginative mayhem for more than a few scenes, making the remainder a fun, but still seen-it-before chop socky flick.

You probably also know that there’s not much of a plot here.  Gareth Evans tried a little bit harder for legitimacy with his previous ‘Merantau’, but in a desire to step up the intensity the plot gets whittled down to bare bones ‘he good, he bad, he bad turn good,’ easily identifiable blips that do nothing except give us a reason to pause between choreographed insanity.

But here’s what there is: Iko Uwais is part of a team of cops that have been assigned to take out a ruthless drug lord occupying a high-rise apartment building, where all the tenants are his lackeys.  Unfortunately, once they’re in they’re in.  There’s no backup coming and the alarm has just gone up for free rent for any tenant who offs an officer.  Thus the pitch would seem to be some kind of floor by floor slaughter until the big boss is taken care of.

What’s good about The Raid: Once it gets to territory it knows how to deal with – guys hitting each other – it’s awesome.  Uwais choreography combined with Evans’ artistically smooth camera swooping around the fights flabbergasts you in the right way.  And once the rapid-fire guns are ditched and we’re down to handguns and knives, the inventive fighting we’re promised (or we expected) commences, stab-stab chop-chop shoot-shoot and on to the next floor.  This might seem like small praise, but it’s what these movies are about, so if you do it well and entertainingly, then you’re on the right path.

What’s disappointing: In order to add to that grittiness, Evans gives this film a very dark palette.  You can tell what’s going on, but unlike ‘Merantau,’ which splashed various scenes with different pop colors, this is almost all blacks, blues and grays, adding to the general feeling of repetition which pops up.  The sequencing is also off.  Ideally you want to ramp up to bigger and crazier – here, the guys lose their guns and knives over the course of the movie, meaning it  almost ramps down.  The attempted workaround for this is to extend some of the final fight scenes, and while they are not uninteresting, there’s a sort of “is this it?” malaise that sets in.  As the cherry on the “aw shucks” sundae, those awesome gun/knife/fist scenes early on are hampered by a freaking shaky cam that I guess was used to either mask the CGI or make things seem crazier or both.  Thankfully this shooting method is ditched, but by then we’re into the more traditional scenes.  These distractions allow you to focus on the giant disappointment of the premise never being fulfilled.  This isn’t a building full of crazies – it’s one or two roaming packs who are broken up and dispatched during those scattered (but numerous) fight scenes.

It sounds like I just trashed the movie, but it’s still tons of fun.  The criticism of it being dumb and violent is accurate, and I wouldn’t hail it as the second coming of action, but Gareth Evans has a good eye for staging scenes and an inventive fight choreographer in Uwais.  I don’t think either were quite prepared for what ‘The Raid’ promoted (and was hailed for…), so let it be a learning ground.  Combined with some of the restraint shown in ‘Merantau’, there is an epic action movie waiting in the wings.

“Think about what you’re doing… you’re going to cut this ten minute fight sequence way short.”

Update: 02/09/19, regarding Unrated blu-ray edition

A crisp transfer, with the appreciated option of the original score, instead of the Linkin Park-ized American one.  Bonus-wise, you have several short featurettes with the director and others speaking to the stunts, production, etc., and some interviews covering, essentially, the same.  Evans’ commentary is quite good – he’s very active throughout the film – but between what he says there and all those extras, you’ll hear the same stories multiple times, so one go-through of, say, the commentary, plus one of the couple of interviews with Mike Shinoda regarding the US score, will cover everything.  I can’t really speak to the ‘unrated’ aspect in terms of what changed or was added; the movie is as I remember seeing it in theaters, so whatever the difference was likely minimal.