Violence is a universal language, and the Indonesian art house film The Raid: Redemption would be just as effective without the English subtitles. When a movie relies on violence for the sake of violence, the end product often doesn’t turn out well. Fortunately, the creators of The Raid knows what they're doing, and feature such epic proportions of action and entertainment — accentuated by great directing — that the usual criticisms of movies like this never apply.
The task at hand in The Raid is for a 20-man SWAT team to take down the drug lord Tama (Ray Sahetapy) and the criminals he’s been housing in a rundown apartment building that’s been raided unsuccessfully many times before. The team is helmed by Sergeant Jaka (Joe Taslim), dedicated to the mission and his men, and Lieutenant Wahyu (Pierre Gruno), an obvious crooked cop whose intentions are not so clear. But it’s the rookie officer and soon-to-be parent Rama (Iko Uwais, also credited as one of the fight choreographers) who serves as the story’s main protagonist.
Once inside the apartment building, and after rather handedly arresting multiple sleazebags, everything goes wrong. In one of The Raid’s many subversively disturbing scenes, a young boy spots the officers and gets picked off by Lieutenant Wahyu for his trouble. This sets off an alarm, and Tama encourages his seemingly infinite number of residents — who spawn from dark rooms and corners — to have their fun with the unwelcome SWAT team.
Gunfire and hand-to-hand combat (showcasing a style of Indonesian mixed martial arts called pencak silat) — including a remarkable level of gore — consume the rest of the film’s appropriate 101 minute runtime, much of which plays out to a pulsating score redone for the American release by Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda. We follow Rama as he makes his way through the building, killing the villains in impressive fashion while trying to find safety for the surviving members of his crew.
Obviously, The Raid is not for the squeamish. If you can’t handle torture porn like Saw and Hostel — though it’s unfair to compare those completely mindless films to Raid in any way aside from their bloodiness — then you’ll most likely find yourself exiting the theater quickly. The Raid is video game-esque action from beginning to end, and that action includes a body count in the hundreds as well as literal bodies strewn across the floor. That’s not a bad thing here. The Raid aspires to be gory art house, and that’s exactly what writer/director Gareth Evans delivers.
But Raid doesn’t make any excuses for itself either; it’s admirably straightforward and honest about the subject matter. With mass amounts of slaughter happening at rapid speed, there’s zero chance the audience cares who exactly is dying, not that there’s even time to make these characters relevant in the first place. During a break in the fighting, Rama asks who some of the victims are. “They’re no one,” is the reply, a nod to the unavoidable obstacle a movie like The Raid runs into.
So while The Raid is primarily a showcase for extreme violence and bloodshed, it’s also a film that works to near perfection. The Raid highlights its strengths — the action and martial arts in particular — while leaving out everything unnecessary. Instead of throwing in ridiculous motivations and back story in an attempt to make sense of all the killing, Evans makes a point to leave things unanswered. Some people are just good, and some people are just bad — end of story.
The nature of good and evil is impossible to understand in reality, and there’s no need for a balls-out action movie to try to solve a philosophical riddle that has stumped man since the dawn of time. It’s a credit to the filmmakers behind The Raid that they didn’t even try.
This article appears in Apr 12-18, 2012.