Franchise Friday: The Raid (2012)
Gareth Evans unleashes a bruising and exhilarating action classic
On the Mount Rushmore of action movies taking place in a contained location — a niche monument if there ever was one — there’s room for four icons.
The first, obviously, would be John McClane. The second would be Tequila, the cop played by Chow Yun Fat in John Woo’s Hard-Boiled. The third would be a toss-up: I understand pulling for Steven Seagal in Under Siege, but my vote would be to meld the faces of Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage in honor of The Rock.
But the fourth? No question: It’s Iko Uwais’ bloody, bruised visage from The Raid.
It might seem strange to include an action film whose U.S. box office haul was only $4 million (it made double that overseas, and its home video haul in the U.S. was $10 million). But for action fans, the film was a sensation. It catapulted Uwais and several of his co-stars to worldwide fame. It earned an epic sequel two years later. And it was a career launch for Evans, who moved on from his sophomore film to helm an entry in V/H/S 2, The Raid 2 and the Netflix horror film The Apostle (his next film, Havoc, stars Tom Hardy and will be released on Netflix later this year).
So brace yourself; we’re going to jump into The Raid, and I can’t promise you won’t get bruises.
15 stories of chaos
There’s an apocryphal story that, after the success of Die Hard, Bruce Willis was pitched every knock-off version of that film possible, ultimately culminating in someone with a straight face suggesting “Die Hard in a building.” Maybe Willis should have listened; The Raid’s premise could easily be described as that (it’s also very similar to the plot of Dredd, released around the same time).
Uwais plays Rama, a Jakarta cop with a pregnant wife at home. He accompanies his team on the raid of a high-rise owned by sadistic gangster Tama (Ray Sahetapy), who offers apartments to criminals and addicts. Tama has two right-hand men: the sadistic Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian) and the more cerebral and rational Andi (Donny Alamsyah), who also happens to be Rama’s estranged brother. Once the cops are in the building, it’s not long before Tama locks them inside and unleashes his army of killers and sweetens the deal by offering free rent to his tenants in exchange for the officers’ heads. There’s a bit of business involving dirty cops, but the overarching plot is pure simplicity: survive the night.
The result is just over 90 minutes of nonstop brutality and visceral thrills. The film barrels along at a bullet pace, rarely stopping to catch its breath. It’s such a relentless, kinetic ride that more than once I stopped to ask myself how no one died making it.
An action classic
What sets The Raid apart from Die Hard is that John McTiernan’s 1988 classic is largely a collection of cat-and-mouse chases, big explosions and high-octane gunfights. There are explosions and shootouts scattered throughout The Raid, but at heart this is a martial arts movie, and one of the most punishing in the genre.
Evans was introduced to Uwais and his co-stars years earlier while filming a documentary on the martial art Pencak silat, which uses an array of fighting and grappling moves, as well as weaponry. Evans’ previous film, Merantau, also starred Uwais and much of the same cast, but was a decidedly more deliberate affair, with the majority of action being saved for the final hour. In The Raid, once the doors to that apartment complex close about 15 minutes in, the fists, feet and bullets don’t stop flying until the credits roll.
I’m always fascinated by the grace of martial arts, but The Raid includes a brutality that shocked me when I first saw it. The actors (many of whom are also judo and other martial arts) pummel, grapple, throw and gouge at one another, their bodies shaking with every hit and the soundtrack punctuating it all with sickening thuds. Several of the fight sequences devolve into bloody chaos as machetes, knives and household tools are used to cut and rip them apart. The choreography is almost unimaginably fast, and Evans' long takes capture all the grace, fluidity and speed of these bodies in motion.
Each fight sequence is like a short film in its own right, rapidly building and ending on a grisly note of punctuation (one fight ends with the use of a broken door that made me wince even on this third viewing). While I can’t quite understand how they coordinated the choreography to move so quickly without anyone getting hurt, I simply can’t understand how Evans pulled off that camera work at all. Fights are filmed in long takes, moving around rooms, down corridors and — in one shot that baffles me — through one apartment and then down a hole in the floor into the apartment below without the melee losing any speed. And each fight is unique; there’s a tense stairway shootout followed by a rumble in an apartment building that makes explosive use of a refrigerator. There’s a suspense-filled encounter where one baddie uses a machete to search out heroes hiding in the wall, several bone-shattering corridor beatdowns, and a two-on-one fight in the finish that is one of the most brutal and exhausting brawls I’ve ever seen.
The ramshackle apartments look grimy and ready to fall apart, primer on the walls. My guess is it’s both verisimilitude as well as a way to use a tight budget to create a set where the actors can smash through walls and floors and destroy everything in their path. It lends the film a scuzzy, dangerous feeling; any minute, you fear you’re going to see an errant hit or kick take one of the actors out of commission.
I’m usually not a fan of non-stop violence for its own sake. But The Raid so skillfully captures these feats of athleticism and choreography that it leaves me gasping in astonishment and wincing in pain. Its stunt show as story, a blistering action film that goes light on narrative and character development because all it wants to do is show off its technical feats. It’s a hell of a ride.
Is there anything deeper?
The film was retitled The Raid - Redemption for its U.S. release, and I don’t quite get it. There’s no real redemption arc to the story; I assume they’re alluding to Rama’s attempts to bring Andi home but, spoiler, even though Andi proves himself to be a good brother, he still ends the film in the same building where he began. I’m assuming it was a marketing attempt to hint at something deeper than mere chaos.
But is there anything deeper there? If you squint.
There are interesting details the film reveals about Rama. Like the majority of Indonesian residents, he’s Muslim, and the film’s opening sequence finds him in the middle of his opening prayers (interspersed with fight training, of course). The film never makes use of that, but it’s still interesting here in the U.S. to see a Muslim action hero. The detail that Rama’s wife is pregnant with their first child gives him emotional stakes for coming home, and Andi’s presence give him an emotional reason to stay in the building.
The relationship between the brothers isn’t particularly revelatory or emotional. It leans on themes of Andi failing to live up to his father’s high expectations, while we gather that Rama has always been the family favorite. It’s a nice emotional through line, but it’s nothing that we haven’t seen before, and its best use is for setting up the two-on-one brawl that pits Andi and Rama against Mad Dog in the climax.
There’s a subplot about police corruption running throughout, as the team’s lieutenant has set the whole raid up to benefit himself. Again, there’s nothing that hasn’t been done before or better in other movies, but it helps pad this out to feature length.
But that lack of originality or depth doesn’t hurt The Raid. The entire thing is so absurdly paced and unrelenting that the leanness of its story is part of the appeal. The only thing the movie needs to do is get its good guys into the apartment, and then unleash hell. Evans is so good at this that the movie’s pace feels overwhelming in all the right ways; it’s like a shot of adrenaline straight through the screen, and even though I’ve seen it three times now, I still feel surprised and energized with every viewing.
Don’t remake this
Of course, the movie’s popularity means that studios who still believe American audiences don’t like subtitles are likely going to try to remake this with popular Western actors. And sure enough, earlier this year, it was announced that director Patrick Hughes and producer Michael Bay will “reimagine” the film for Netflix (whether it will star Chris and Liam Hemsworth, as a previous attempt had planned, is still undetermined).
This is a horrible idea. A flashy, slick Hollywood remake would likely take all the grit, rawness and danger out of the idea, and I can’t imagine there are any Hollywood stars who are well-versed in the brutal martial artistry used here. I can already see it as either as yet another John Wick-inspired ripoff (when much of the close quarters fighting and shooting from Wick was inspired by The Raid), or a heavily edited martial arts movie that lacks any of the punch on the original.
I don’t know whether Evans is done with the series or not, but he’s shown he’s willing to go bigger with these ideas and characters (which we’ll get to next week). But if a studio saw the appeal of The Raid and really wanted to capture an audience, I’d suggest throwing some money at Evans, Uwais and the rest and going big for a crazy third entry into the series.
Of course, The Raid 2 has enough badassery and story to cover an entire trilogy. But we’ll get to that next Friday.