The Raid–also known as The Raid: Redemption, in a move that will send you to Wikipedia to make sure you’re not accidentally watching a sequel instead–is a no-holds-barred action movie, with all the pluses and minuses of that.
The pluses are obvious, graphic, and plentiful. The film features spectacular action choreography, especially in its fight scenes, and director Gareth Evans (unlike, say, Michael Bay) always has an acute sense of space that lets you see how one character is relating to another. The movement is fluid and easy to follow; the stunts are inventive and often varied; the injuries result in some convincing, wince-inducing splatter.
The minuses only start surfacing once the adrenaline fades. The Raid tries to spend slightly too much of its runtime at a fever pitch of non-stop action, and after a certain point, it starts to feel like you’re running lead character Rama (Iko Uwais) through a video game: whatever damage he takes doesn’t really matter in the long run, and you can always keep hitting the buttons over and over again. Kick! Punch! Shoot! The danger stops feeling real and surprising.
This aspect, however, has a kind of winning tongue-in-cheek nature to it, because The Raid wears its video game similarities on its sleeve. Rama literally has to fight his way through various levels, with the difficulty ramping up as he goes along until he finally faces the Big Boss. The biggest incredulous laugh comes when someone rejects the opportunity to pick up a fallen enemy’s weapon. You always grab the loot! What’s wrong with you? On the surface, the movie is fairly po-faced, with its characters rarely cracking so much as a smile, let alone a joke, but this kind of structural playfulness lightens the mood a little. It acknowledges that while the characters are right to approach their situation with a deadly seriousness, it wouldn’t make sense for us to do the same. This is, after all, a movie about a SWAT-like team–unauthorized, as it turns out–fighting its way through a multi-story apartment building populated with criminals under the command of a major crime lord who sits up in his surveillance nest and declares via PA system that tenants who kill the intruders will get to live rent-free. It’s high-concept to the point of comedy, and director Gareth Evans knows it, even if his characters don’t.
As the film goes on, it doesn’t trim back its excesses, but it starts to balance them with some slight but genuine character development and drama. Rama and Andi (Donny Alamsyah), the crime lord’s second-in-command, turn out to have a connection that complicates Andi’s loyalties and adds a little bit of a twist to the proceedings. (It also motivates a tense, beautifully staged elevator fight.) The stealth MVP of the movie turns out to be Gofar (Iang Darmawan). I have no idea why Gofar is living in this building in the first place, since he seems to inexplicably be the sole healthy person around who isn’t either a violent criminal or drugged out of his mind, but Darmawan generates some real pathos around Gofar’s ordinariness, from his efforts to care for his sick wife to his decision to aid Rama and his squadmates despite the risk it brings. Things like that ground all the flashy stunts in a little bit of human feeling.
The Raid: Redemption is streaming free on HBO Max.