Grade C+: In The Raid: Redemption (trailer), a SWAT team in an unnamed country raids a residential building that’s been taken over by criminals. Their aim is simple; to remove crime lord Tama (Ray Sahetapy) and his minions from from the building and return it to the people. But things don’t go as planned and when the SWAT team with rookie officer Rama (Iko Uwais) finds out that their raid is unauthorized with no one knowing where they are, it’s too late. They’re already inside and team find themselves with the unenviable task of fighting their way back out of the building through hundreds of killers all out for their blood.
The Raid reminded me a great deal of the John Carpenter classic Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), except here instead of the bad guys trying to break into the building housing the cops they’re instead trying to keep the cops from breaking out. However, I’d say the big difference between The Raid and Assault on Precinct 13 is that whereas Assault had an interesting story, The Raid was mostly martial arts fight scenes only interrupted by little strings of story.
I’m usually a sucker for movies with extended fight scenes – see my review of Haywire. But in Haywire, where the fight scenes seem like tightly focused beams of hurt, the many, many fight scenes of The Raid seem akin to fireworks. At first they’re awesome but after a while it becomes background noise.
Don’t get me wrong; the fights in The Raid were all well choreographed, extremely violent and exciting – in fact some of them were the best scenes of that type I’ve ever seen committed to film. But, by the end of The Raid I was suffering from some serious “fight fatigue” and was ready for all the punching to be over.
