I have to admit, the reason The Raid is on this list because I got it confused with The Purge, and I didn’t feel like changing it once it started playing. Now, you might be thinking to yourself “How could you possibly confuse The Raid with The Purge, Mr. Thunderbird? They’re two completely different films, released in different years, from different countries.” I don’t know what to tell you folks, the mind is a strange and multifaceted enigma. The same thing happens when it comes to The Mist/The Happening and Richard Dean Anderson/Jeffrey Dean Morgan too. Can’t explain it, won’t explain it, that’s just the way she goes.
Anyway.
So what is The Raid, or The Raid: Redemption as it’s known in the West? Well, it’s an Indonesian film, directed by a Welshman, and it’s about a raid (this is why I get paid the big blog bucks). Specifically, it’s a police raid on an apartment complex owned by Tama Rayadi. Tama is a big name in the criminal business, particularly in the field of narcotics, and his apartment building is more of a fortress, with the machete-wielding army to match. The team, extremely inexperienced in these types of scenarios, is extremely murdered by the crooks, leaving only a few survivors left. With no supplies and no reinforcements coming, it’s up to our unnamed protagonist (at least I think he is, I don’t recall them ever bringing it up) and the remaining police officers to fight their way through hundreds of murderous thugs, capture Tama, and get the hell out of there. Of course, just because it seems simple enough doesn’t mean it can’t get complicated really quick.
So what does The Raid bring to the table as a movie? Action. That kind of hyper-kinetic, oftentimes hyper-violent action that’s been so popular these days, like a Jackie Chan movie on speed. It’s jonesing for it in fact, there’d not a minute that goes by in The Raid that’s not a fight scene or a suspenseful build-up to a fight scene. Not just any fight scenes either, but intensely choreographed experiences that makes the hallway fight in Oldboy look like a Dolemite movie by comparison. People are getting their brains blowed out left and right, getting their throats cut with jagged glass, tossed face/spine first into walls and filing cabinets, and occasionally engaging in martial arts. It’s an amazingly tense spectacle, with the director attempting, and succeeding, to one-up himself every fight. If any movie could be called the Metal Gear Rising of film, The Raid makes a strong case.
Unfortunately, while The Raid delivers in terms of action, it falters when it comes to story and characters. While predecessors like Hot Fuzz and Kung Fu Hustle had the advantage of being comedies, and thus had access to larger-than-life characters and events, and Dredd (which borrows heavily from The Raid’s plot) centered around super-serious, super-satirical Judge Dredd, The Raid really...doesn’t. At all. The plot is simple, which is fine for a martial arts movie, but most characters are just kind of there, with very little dialogue, lacking even the basic traits that would make them a archetype. They exist only to fight and/or die, which would be fine if this were Streets of Rage and not a movie, which needs strong characters in order to keep the audience engaged. If your film is almost indistinguishable from someone editing together a bunch of clips of fight scenes on youtube, can you really call it ‘good’? The late Roger Ebert said said no, and although I don’t feel as harshly about it as he did, I don’t disagree with him.
However, if what you want is balls-to-the-wall excitement, a popcorn flick you can put on and entertain a crowd, than that is what you get with The Raid. It’s not a film that you watch by yourself in a dark room (my life in a nutshell), it’s a film that, like the gladiators of ancient Rome, lives and dies by the roars of the bloodthirsty crowd. If that’s the kind of world you’re living in this Halloween, then throw The Raid on the TV and have some fun. If you’re not, then start living it. You’ll thank me later.
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