The Raid (2012)
Directed by Gareth Evans
Deep in the heart of Jakarta's slums lies an impenetrable safe house for the world's most dangerous killers and gangsters. Until now, the run-down apartment block has been considered untouchable to even the bravest of police. Cloaked under the cover of pre-dawn darkness and silence, an elite swat team is tasked with raiding the safe house in order to take down the notorious drug lord that runs it. But when a chance encounter with a spotter blows their cover and news of their assault reaches the drug lord, the building's lights are cut and all the exits blocked. Stranded on the sixth floor with no way out, the unit must fight their way through the city's worst to survive their mission. Starring Indonesian martial arts sensation Iko Uwais.
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20 films that influenced The Raid
What critics say influenced The Raid
Gareth Evans’ Indonesian martial-arts throwback The Raid: Redemption has a look and feel that resembles the best of ’80s cult action movies: half John Carpenter , half John Woo.
Think "Die Hard" crossed with one of those old karate movies they used to show on Sunday afternoon on WGNO-TV back in the '80s -- and then add an obscene level of violent bloodshed -- and you've got a good idea of what's in store.
But a vertical environment has different rules, and cities have been the setting for game-changing flicks such as "Die Hard" and "Oldboy."
The plot setup is in the vein of "Assault on Precinct 13" and " Die Hard " (among many others), but plot is hardly the point.
Have you ever wondered what "Die Hard" would be like if John McClane knew how to roundhouse-kick people in the face and disarm bloodthirsty, machete-wielding henchmen?
—Mad Dog, Take the closed-set claustrophobia of Die Hard, add the gritty cops versus gangsters nihilism of Assault on Precinct 13, and blend in some Indonesian machete-fu and — voila!
Writer-editor-director Gareth Huw Evans stages "The Raid's" 15 floors of mayhem as if he tossed "Hard Boiled," "Supercop" and "Die Hard" into a blender and hit purée.
A throwback to the type of stripped-down thriller that might have attracted John Carpenter before the "Assault on Precinct 13" director lost his mojo, the English-subtitled "The Raid" is probably the purest action movie to reach a Memphis theater since Thailand's "Ong-Bak" in 2005.
"The Raid" ends up mixing classic John Woo-style action with the tense siege atmosphere of John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13."
In 1948's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Alfonso Bedoya's bandit sneered a classic snatch of dialogue at Humphrey Bogart's prospector: "Badges?
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No doubt Evans has been to school on the classic Hong Kong action movies of the ’80s and ’90s, and is also steeped in a venerable American drive-in aesthetic: Imagine if John Woo had directed “Escape From New York,” and Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken wasn’t just a badass but a finely honed Indonesian fighting machine.
"The Raid" ends up mixing classic John Woo-style action with the tense siege atmosphere of John Carpenter's "Assault on Precinct 13."
A throwback to the type of stripped-down thriller that might have attracted John Carpenter before the "Assault on Precinct 13" director lost his mojo, the English-subtitled "The Raid" is probably the purest action movie to reach a Memphis theater since Thailand's "Ong-Bak" in 2005.
It's subtitled with an Asian cast, directed by Welshman Gareth Evans, who went to film school in the U.K. The fighting styles are strictly Eastern, but the movie's DNA has the feel of a Hollywood B-movie - Assault on Precinct 13 (the John Carpenter original) has been cited as an influence, and that seems about right.
Think Hard Boiled, but in tighter spaces.
Writer-editor-director Gareth Huw Evans stages "The Raid's" 15 floors of mayhem as if he tossed "Hard Boiled," "Supercop" and "Die Hard" into a blender and hit purée.
If you ever wanted a feature-length version of the scene from Tony Jaa’s “The Protector” where in one shot he literally fights his way up to the roof of a building filled with baddies, then “The Raid” is the movie for you.
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I'm not talking about dramas that contain a scene or two of action but rather films fueled by their action -- films like "Hard-Boiled," "The Seven Samurai," "The Matrix," "District B13."
Comparable thrill-a-minute films like District B13 had at least a modicum of story development to fall back on, keeping the film moving forward while giving the audience enough of a breather to make the eventual return to martial arts insanity a welcome sight, but all The Raid seems to muster is a meaningful conversation or two before it’s back to basics.
If true, it's been a nice couple of years for Carpenter, whose influence has been felt in District B13 and that other recent masterpiece of apartment-building mayhem, Attack the Block.
And it's not just a cop movie — it's kind of a horror movie, too, the whole film reminiscent of the opening SWAT-team-in-a-housing-project sequence in George Romero's Dawn of the Dead.