The Raid

Overview

Every now and then a movie comes out that proves surprisingly different from what its name or trailer led us to believe. Three Kings, from 1999, for example, looked like a B-grade action movie but actually turned out to be one of the more poignant anti-war movies of the past few decades. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, too, was a beautiful love story that most people assumed was simply another martial arts film.

The Raid, by director Gareth Evans, is not one of those movies. It looks like an action movie, it sounds like an action movie, and holy crap does it deliver as an action movie. The title alone tells you absolutely everything you need to know about the plot: this is a film about a raid. It's a raid on a building. People are raided. Under no circumstances should you trick yourself into thinking it's actually referring to a spiritual or metaphoric raid by a disabled orphan upon a grumpy old man's heart (though somebody write that down). Instead, The Raid is a simple but fantastic movie for people with simple and fantastically violent tastes.

The film takes place entirely within the confines of a dilapidated high-rise building in Jakarta's slums. An elite team of police officers are sent in after a crime boss living on the tower's top floor, but when their plans fall apart, they soon find themselves isolated, trapped inside and battling dozens of enraged henchmen. From that moment forth the action is utterly relentless, both narratively and physically, with violence at times so extreme the stuntmen probably asked for stuntmen.

The dialogue is also pretty thin, even for an action movie, and it's a fair bet that of the 90 or so pages in The Raid's screenplay, 89 of them just said, "Aaaaaaaaargh!!!" Even so, Evans has put together a truly heart-pumping grindhouse feature here that will appeal to fans of action movies ranging from Die Hard to Ong Bak. The direction is slick and self-assured, the choreography simply mind-blowing and the action quite literally nonstop. Yippee ki-yay, mothers...