Matt says: Let’s get it out of the way before I go any further; The Raid barely has a story, and it couldn’t matter less. The film begins with our main character kissing his wife goodbye and immediately joining a unit of special forces to infiltrate and raid a tenement building owned by a seedy drug lord. Floor by floor they climb in silence, hoping to keep the element of surprise. An alarm is activated, and from this point forward, The Raid takes on a breakneck pace and never lets up. 



Before The Raid (now considered one of the most influential actions films of the last decade), the recent trend for Hollywood action films was a steady diet of shaky-cam. The success of The Bourne trilogy had many filmmakers emulating Paul Greengrass’s extreme close-ups, quick cuts and frenetic action sequences from the second and third installments of that franchise. In contrast, Gareth Evans films the fight sequences in The Raid like a Mortal Kombat match. The combatants are visible from head to toe and the camera follows the action instead of blurring the intensity with jerky movements and unnecessary close ups. It would be nothing short of a sin to not pull the cork out of this bottle and let it breathe with long, uncut shots, because the Indonesian Pencak Silat martial arts on display is an absolute master class. Iko Uwais, Yayan Ruhian, Donny Alamsyah, and Joe Taslim put on breathtaking physical performances with an intensity that will sear itself into your brain and become the measuring stick you compare all future fight sequences to.

The ultimate reason this movie is so near and dear to my heart is that it feels like a brilliant piece of survival horror. Once the special forces operation goes to hell, The Raid finds ways of fusing the slow-burn build of tension and suspense with the next punch-in-the-face adrenaline-laced set piece. The insurmountable odds our hero is facing don’t feel much different than that in Alien, The Purge, or Train to Busan. The audience knowing that certain death waits behind every corner of the high-rise building, and that Yayan Ruhian’s Mad Dog character is going to show up sooner or later is truly menacing stuff. Getting to see THIS movie in THIS theatre is a treat that you should not deny yourself.

I’ll see you there.

In Indonesian with English subtitles