The Raid Trilogy (Gareth Evans, 2012-??)

[dad1153]

Saw THE RAID: REDEMPTION early this morning at Lincoln Cinemas on 68th St. (pretty packed for an 11:30AM showing) and, if you can ignore the so-obviously-telegraphed-they-don't-work last act twists that were meant to shock but don't, it's one of the most satisfying ass-kicking action/martial arts flicks I've seen in a long time. Yayan Ruhian's Mad Dog steals the movie; whenever he's on you cheer even though he's the villain's henchman, but damn if he doesn't live by a 'code' that makes him do things that in any other movie would seem stupid, but here you totally buy what Mad Dog does to get his kicks. Iko Uwais is decent as Rama (if he has a passable-enough English Iko might actually become a direct-to-video action star) but it's his fighting and not his acting you'll walk away from this remembering. There's at least three good-to-excellent fight /action sequences, the premise is ripe for an American remake (please God, no!) and the movie is a model of how to maximize limited locations/sets (it doesn't take a genius to figure out they're fighting/walking through the same corridors/rooms, but the production design is good-enought to disguise the limitations) on a shoestring. I didn't like the rap song during the end credits; feels like something Sony added to the US release, but I guess that's the studio thinking it can hook young black filmgoers to sample the flick. If it's playing near you don't hesitate; "The Raid: Redemption" is worth seeing in a theater for the collective reactions of the crowd as they go 'Oh shit!' simultaneously about a dozen times.

[Finch]

dad1153, I've been following The Raid ever since the first announcement on Twitch and look forward to the UK release in May. The only concern I have is that the fighting might get repetitive after a while and that the story might be too slight to hold up on multiple viewings. What's your take on this?

The film had a reassuringly high BO this weekend, nearly 16K per screen average, and Sony Pictures Classics will expand into more cities going forward.

[dad1153]

Repetitiveness isn't an issue with "The Raid." In the movie (a) we keep moving around the building so the background (a meth lab, various floors, different apartments) changes, (b) weapons (knives/clubs/guns/machetes/metal pipes/anything anyone gets a hold of... it's the "Final Fight" fun kit! :D) and bad guys keep changing, (c) as the story progresses you get to care about who's fighting (for real) so there's no need for showy/flashy fight choreography (which we get anyway) because every blow/kick counts and (d) the bad guys are awesome (Mad Dog particularly). The set-up for a sequel at the end surprised me because it's so obvious and simple I didn't think of it as a slick cynical calculation for future movie money but the movie's natural conclusion Don't set your expectations sky-high (it's still at its core a cheaply-done action/fighting movie) but don't expect the usual dreck.

[JMULL222]

I don't think you can call RAID one of the best martial arts movies ever made (if only because the narrative/subtext/etc certainly isn't as detailed or nuanced as something like "36 CHAMBERS OF SHAOLIN") but it DOES have some of the best martial arts sequences of all time. This is a must see for fans of the genre. A grindhouse throwback in the good way (like "DEATH PROOF" or "I KNOW WHO KILLED ME") not in a bad way (like "HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN").

[Finch]

Thanks folks. May can't come soon enough. Already lowered my expectations a little as regards the plot after several sites said that the twist is obvious and a forehead-slapper. Still, the action looks quite literally awesome so I should still have a fun time watching this in eight weeks. If it delivers, I'll put in my preorder for the US Blu-Ray pronto.

[wattsup32]

Saw THE RAID: REDEMPTION early this morning at Lincoln Cinemas on 68th St. (pretty packed for an 11:30AM showing) and, if you can ignore the so-obviously-telegraphed-they-don't-work last act twists that were meant to shock but don't, it's one of the most satisfying ass-kicking action/martial arts flicks I've seen in a long time. Yayan Ruhian's Mad Dog steals the movie; whenever he's on you cheer even though he's the villain's henchman, but damn if he doesn't live by a 'code' that makes him do things that in any other movie would seem stupid, but here you totally buy what Mad Dog does to get his kicks. Iko Uwais is decent as Rama (if he has a passable-enough English Iko might actually become a direct-to-video action star) but it's his fighting and not his acting you'll walk away from this remembering. There's at least three good-to-excellent fight /action sequences, the premise is ripe for an American remake (please God, no!) and the movie is a model of how to maximize limited locations/sets (it doesn't take a genius to figure out they're fighting/walking through the same corridors/rooms, but the production design is good-enought to disguise the limitations) on a shoestring. I didn't like the rap song during the end credits; feels like something Sony added to the US release, but I guess that's the studio thinking it can hook young black filmgoers to sample the flick. If it's playing near you don't hesitate; "The Raid: Redemption" is worth seeing in a theater for the collective reactions of the crowd as they go 'Oh shit!' simultaneously about a dozen times.

This is a pretty spot on assessment. I don't think the "twists" were meant to be twists to anyone other than the characters in the movie. So, I don't think they were meant to shock. But, that's probably the only place we part company.

It was balls-to-the-wall in the best way possible. 111 minutes long with about 8 minutes of reprieve. The rest is a sprint to the end to see who can kick the most ass. Surprisingly nuanced and fleshed out villans considering they got very little screen time. The crowd was awestruck and repeatedly exclaimed as much.

If I were forced to describe it in one word it would be "efficient." I mean that with the maximum amount of praise. I was truly impressed.

[dad1153]

Saw Gareth Evans' THE RAID 2 earlier this week. There's at least an hour's worth (in a 2 1/2 hr. action movie?) of average-at-best mash-up plot stealing awkwardly from "Internal Affairs," "The Godfather," "The Recruit," etc. spliced-together (there are no fights for the first half-hour) to tie the plot of the first "Raid" to it's epic-sized sequel. While ambition and scope are welcomed in any sequel, I couldn't help but miss the videogame-like simplicity and fat-free narrative of the original "The Raid: Redemption": fight or die, floor to floor in a locked building, to try and get out alive. Iko Uwais' Rama remains a solid anchor and likable protagonist on which the movie's action pieces come to rest comfortably, but whenever he's not on-screen kicking butt and other characters talk and chew scenery (including Rama's wife and kid, but mostly other bad guys and apparently the one good cop in all of Indonesia) you'll find yourself wishing your hands were around Evans' neck. The nods to Tarantino-cool cinema cliches (i.e. assassins clearly inspired by "Kill Bill" and its ilk) were also quite jarring and seemingly from an entirely different movie universe, but whatever. It's Gareth's movie. So what if he brings back Mad Dog (as an entirely different character, but so clearly him the audience in my theater cheered when he first appeared)? It's his playhouse, I'm only paying to be in it for a little while.

But then "The Raid 2's" action scenes kick in, slow at first. A bathroom scuffle here, a prison riot there. And then, by it's last half-hour, "The Raid 2" has morphed into a kinetic orgy of well-staged, non-stop, creatively-shot (think 80's Hong Kong action cinema on steroids), CG-free (except for the blood) action spectacles that not only involve Rama's fists and legs but cars, hammers, baseball bats, mud, shotguns and, best of all, creativity. Forget Nolan's and Toni Scott's shaky-cam constructs. This is a movie that knows how to use the X/Y axis, a zoom-in and a cut to make every movement by on-screen fighters feel magnified times a thousand. Considering the villain's hechman in this movie isn't as charismatic as Mad Dog it's saying something that his final one-on-one with Rama makes the one in "Redemption" look like a warm-up. We better enjoy Evens and Uwais while we can, because there's no way Hollywood doesn't see "The Raid 2" and quickly snaps them to make a movie or two so they can stretch a $20 million budget into something that seems three times as expensive (the way Robert Rodriguez used to make them). In case you missed my point: despite the flaws, "The Raid 2" MUST be seen for you to believe ass-kicking action movies without CG can still be done so well, so rad and so convincingly.

[Cold Bishop]

I'm surprised (and somewhat relieved) that our forum hasn't had a dedicated "vulgar auteurism" thread, but you better believe I'm stoked for this. I fought against The Raid all I could due to its brute simplicity and deliberate ugliness, but goddammit if the movie didn't win me over by the end.

[Finch]

The Raid 2 is the first real disappointment of this year for me. The original film was fast-paced and it felt fresh and exciting. The second film is more than twice as long and it feels that way too: bloated with none of the economy of the first one. One example: Rama has to find an opportunity to smuggle a microphone into the wallet of the son of the Japanese mafia family, and the film wastes five minutes altogether before we get to that point. Thing is: I don't mind long or very long films as long as they use the time wisely. The Raid 2 isn't alone in failing in this (almost all big studio tentpoles are just as guilty if not more so) but it fails in that regard all the same. The scheming between the two clans that Rama is investigating has been done before in many other films and at least a few have done it miles better than Evans' film (Takeshi Kitano's Outrage 2 is similarly convoluted but the double-crossing and intrigues were a lot more fascinating; now that I think of it, I wonder if the baseball bat killer in this was a deliberate nod to the kill with a baseball in Outrage 2). The novelty and simplicity of the first Raid is gone and I don't think Evans handles the bigger scale well. Supposedly, the story for this film was originally meant to be for a different film which he planned to shoot before the original Raid and it shows. The film is over-stuffed with characters that it never really makes me care for and it is a real shame because some of them seemed quite appealing in their eccentricity. I'd have liked to hear more about Hammer Girl, the rival crime boss Bejo and Hammer Girl's sidekick with the baseball bat, for example. But there is nothing to any of the characters beyond either a cool look or a unique killing method so that when the final fight in a kitchen arrived, I tuned out half-way through. I liked the physicality of it, the editing and the blood spraying like in Lone Wolf & Cub and Lady Snowblood, but it meant little to me. I also found many of the locations bland and almost cheap-looking. I did, however, love the 5-6 minute car chase scene and some cues in the soundtrack were awesome. Have got to say that on the evidence of Raid 2, I'm not particularly looking forward to Raid 3. If I had to give Gareth Evans some advice, it'd be this: get a script editor for film three and make it 90 minutes of lean action with just enough characterisation to give us a reason to care for your characters. The first Raid was a terrific B-movie and didn't need to be transformed into a third-rate gangster/yakuza epic. Get back to your roots before you develop too much hubris and turn into Peter Jackson (urgh). If the first Raid was a"B", this one is, sadly, a "C".

PS.: Seconding warrenoates' comments on Cheap Thrills.

[Cold Bishop]

It's interesting that in many ways, I feel both comments above about The Raid 2 are saying the same thing. It's a overlong, overstuffed film that completely torpedoes the original's simplicity for a gangland saga, a film where Rama becomes increasingly a supporting character in his own film. No, there was no way that Evans was ever going to recreate the single-mindedness of the first film; trying to recreate it would be a losing game. However, it's not simply that Gareth Evans is trying to expand the palette he's working with, he's trying to make a mythology out of a film that was essentially just fight after fight. The result is that even when he finds a compelling character or situation, it passes too quickly then it's gone. I'm thinking particularly of Yayan Ruhian, playing the near-opposite of his character in the last film, and bringing a touching sense of sadness to a film that could probably use more emotions than "oh shit, did you see that!"

It creates something of an oxymoron: a) It's a film that's not as good as The Raid; b) It's a more promising film than The Raid in regards to Gareth Evan's future career. The story may be "third-rate", but its still impressive seeing Evans direct on this scale, even if he doesn't show quite the talent in writing to it. And the action scenes go bigger in the best way. Yet Evans never loses sense that the thrill of martial-arts cinema is the simplicity of human bodies in motion. I don't think it's any mistake that the film's grand final set-piece is an intimate one-on-one fight, the only weaponry being short-blades that play into the simplicity of the leg, elbow and fist-work. Not only are these moments more detailed and sharply choreographed than the last film, but when he does go for grand "blockbuster" set-pieces, he also nails it: the combination car-chase/shoot out/brawl will probably be the action setpiece of the year. This sort of CGI-free physicality and wanton destruction, with a questionable disregard for both city infrastructure and stunt-people, harkens back to the glory days of Hong Kong.

If anything, the film is exhausting, not slow. It's not simply the convoluted plot and frequency of action. It's a brutal, violent, just plain mean film, without a single moment of levity. I know Evans is trying to play up to the pressure-cooker intensity of the original, but I think this film needed some humor, gallows or otherwise, almost as much as it needed another draft or a more punishing editor. If anything, the deliberate ugliness of the original is ramped up, and there is something disturbingly antisocial about it. A few club-set scenes in the middle of the film had me thinking of Refn's Only God Forgives and it says something that it occurred to me that this straight-ahead action film is actually more bleak, disturbing and downright gory than Refn's arthouse provocation. The cliche "beaten to a pulp" takes on a new and literal meaning in a film like this. Some of this may be the lingering aftertaste of The Act of Killing being unfairly filtered through this film's bleak vision of law/order and city life, but there's something off-putting about just how relentlessly cruel the film is.

But for now, Evans' work is still relentlessly exhilarating. If he can build on the palette here while keeping the focus zeroed in on Rama for the next film, he might create the perfect synthesis for The Raid 3. The fact that it's suppose to begin two hours before this film ends

Spoiler

(the Japanese war on the police?)

makes me question if this will happen.

[feihong]

I was not thrilled by The Raid 2, but I hadn't been thrilled by the first Raid either. Neither picture for me lived up to Merantau, which, even though the plot was simplistic, was a more decently good-humored film, with a more interestingly open protagonist than Iko Uwais played in either of the subsequent Raid movies. Also, Merantau was a movie really filled with Silat, and both Raid movies only came alive for me when Iko Uwais was doing real Silat fighting.

Nothing else in these movies is really very special. The gangster plots painfully lack in interest. The performances are almost uniformly not involving. Characters are not developed. There is no intrigue in the plot, since we see the movers and the shakers announce every scheme that ends up being the subject of the next scene or two. The sets are all but nondescript settings for a) bloodshed or b) stunt fighting. And the big fights full of people tackling each other indiscriminately are not distinguished. The Silat battles are what is most interesting, and I'd like to see more of them, and far less of the guns, the rumbles, and the car chases. Cold Bishop's point about the picture being humorless is really to the point; here's a film with a character called Hammer Girl--and she comes equipped with a sidekick who kills with a baseball. This kind of thing in a Hong Kong movie, with Cory Yuen or Sammo Hung doing the action, would be comic book insanity, but in fact, these two cartoon characters fight only in the most seriously blood-curdling scenes, replete with horror-film-style slayings--and their fights are portrayed with gruesomely realistic physicality that ultimately sells them short. These characters should be bouncing off the walls, but the film delivers them as straight-ahead hitmen, no different from the more serious (but more interesting) guy with the knives. With the exception of the few points at which Iko Uwais gets to demonstrate his real grace and skill, these movies demonstrate no saving sense of fun.

[Finch]

Agree with feihong and most of what ColdBishop said though I personally thought the film had some humour of the pitch-black variety: remember how when the baseball bat killer dispatched his victims, each hit was accompanied by a "boing boing" sound effect? That was an almost Looney Tunes-esque touch but the film is indeed very grim otherwise. Bishop is spot on when he says that the film attempts some deeper characterisation with some of the characters but doesn't have the patience or conviction to see it through.