A raid in a
mob occuped building goes terribly wrong.
After “Merantau”
Gareth Evans and his choreographer/action star Iko Ulwais tried to develop a
big prison themed movie. Things didn’t went through and so they downsized
themselves quite a lot and made “The raid” in record time to keep their names
on the market. Very good for them because “The Raid” proved extremely successful
and established new house names in the martial arts panorama.
Basically
they skipped all the troubles with “Merantau” plot by practically abolishing
it.
I’m not
joking, for all intents and purposes “The raid” is an extremely long and
convoluted fight scenes putting Iko Ulwais SWAT hero against an entire building
full of machete wielding, machine gun blazing, Silat practicing crazy mobster.
Yes every now and then we stop for a little bit of exposition, mainly bad guy
gloating about stuff, but we never ever leave the building and more often than
not that exposition is interrupted by some crazy action. It’s that relentless.
It’s all
very creative. Instead of those strange worlds where people don’t use firearms
at all here everybody is a very bad sportsman and so they try to kill each
other in many creative ways.
Evans
clearly learned many lessons while doing “Merantau”. The action is more slick,
the shoots more interesting, and the light placement professional. It’s still
not perfect. The action is so relentless that the various fights merge with
each other and the rhythm is too much stop and go but in the end it’s very
difficult to sustain tension for almost two straight hours, there’s one of the
reasons no one tries something like this.
Now that
they are famous they are aiming for their aborted bigger project. If they can
fix their plot troubles we could have a martial arts masterpiece.
Conclusion:
For fans of the genre this is unmissable but if you can’t appreciate a good
machete swing you’ll better go elsewhere.
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