The plot is simplicity itself. A terrifying drug lord (Ray
Sahetapy) has an entrenched base of operations on the top floor of a ramshackle
apartment building where he gives free or low-income housing to his small army
of thugs, flunkies, and other assorted enforcers. The police are determined to
take him out so an elite team armed to the teeth storms into the building,
determined to take it over one floor at a time. Easier said than done,
obviously. The film then follows mostly undifferentiated police fighting almost
exclusively unidentified criminals in a knockdown drag-out fight up and down
the stairwells and in and out of windows and up and down fire escapes, the
police making upward progress and the criminals knocking them back down.
The opening minutes of the film gives us our stock reasons
to care about our entry point character, Rama (Iko Uwais). He’s a policeman who
wakes up, does some crunches, says his prayers, and kisses his pregnant wife
goodbye. Then he heads off to join his co-workers in the back of the police van
loading their guns, strapping on their bulletproof vests, and solidifying their
strategy. It’s the slightest of rooting interests with this ostensible
protagonist. He’s a good guy, apparently, since he takes care of himself, is
religious, is an expectant father, is prepared for his job, and gets along well
with his colleagues.
But he never becomes more than our assumed hero, is never
more than his physical prowess and competent charisma, just as none of the
other characters become anything more than fighters. These are figures defined
entirely by how well they can execute bone-crunching fight choreography. Unlike
the best action films, even ones as spare and simple as this one, the people in
The Raid: Redemption are never
expanded or deepened through what we see of their physicality. Here, their
actions are not revealing anything deeper about themselves or their situations.
When a character kills an opponent in some new way, there’s no real impact on
our understanding other than knowing that he possesses some heretofore-unseen
killing skills.
The film is undeniably well choreographed. The cast is energetic,
athletic, and with the peak physical capabilities to pull off sustained martial
arts combat. But there’s a reason why Fred Astaire movies aren’t 100 minutes of
tap-dancing. It’s the same reason why action movies, when they’re good, tend to
rely on more than nonstop action. As the thin wisps of characterization and
plot float away while the action grinds forward, the whole thing grows
monotonous and the angry criminal hordes aren’t the only people to feel
bludgeoned by the experience. The best moments are when Evans modulates the
action with silence and tension. I loved a scene in which two policemen hide in
the walls of an apartment and an enemy combatant searching for them stabs
randomly through cheap drywall. I also liked characters’ clever retreat
downwards by axing through floorboards. But those moments are both found in the
first half of the movie.
There’s only so many times that you can watch people get
sniped, sliced, macheted, hammered, shot, sliced, smacked, kicked, punched,
chopped, garroted, exploded, flipped, stabbed and flung before it starts to
wear you down. At first it’s all great bloody action, but it lost my interest
fairly quickly. Once the film opens its bag of tricks and runs through each and
every one, it can only repeat and escalate. As a whole the film has none of the
impact of even one action sequence in Haywire
or Mission: Impossible – Ghost
Protocol, just to name the two best action movies of the last year or so.
It holds nothing back, and it’s all so amped up and hyper-violent with so
little reason to care that, after a point, it’s all too easy to get left
behind.
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