Ex-pat British director Gareth Evans bursts onto the international scene with The Raid, an ultra-violent, insanely assaultive battering ram of an action film. Is this Indonesia’s greatest ever export? The set-up is hardly complicated: a 20-strong SWAT team converge on an apartment building to extract a master criminal, Tama (Ray Sahetapy) a man for so long viewed as untouchable by authorities and eliminate any of his swarming minions that get in the way.
Under the direction of veteran Wahyu (Pierre Gruno), fiery team leader Jaka (Joe Taslim) leads his men into battle, unaware of the firepower about to be trained in the direction of his squad. Amongst the crew is inexperienced rookie Rama (Iko Uwais) whose survival instincts prove crucial as the numbers on both sides dwindle. It’s his individual exploits that significantly raise the bar of Evans’ film and make him its star attraction.
The Raid deserves the sounding off of a roll-call of appropriate adjectives it’s a kinetic, propulsive, merciless edge of the seat drama that carries you along, as if on the lip of a tidal wave, into the fray of relentless gun battles and hand-to-hand combat, utilising everything at the combatants disposal from knives, machetes and the a lethal combination of fists.
The police, working under non-sanctioned orders and therefore unable to summon replenishments are reduced to reactive puppets whose lives are blotted out like ink stains. Extricate the evil crime lord proves painfully less feasible by the second with Tama’s men ruthlessly focused on exterminating the marauders.
Uwais, a martial arts star in his homeland provides an impressive physical dexterity in plentiful, magnificently choreographed fight sequences. Evans, who wrote, directed and edited for film, deserves a medal for the attention to detail in his narrative and also for the thoroughly inventive ways he’s concocted for dispatching men to their deaths. A hallway sequence half an hour into proceedings, in which Rama singlehandedly annihilates wave after wave of attackers, is the first real indication of the special qualities this film possesses.
The Raid is not for the squeamish it uses brutality with all the subtlety of a madman blindly wielding a sledgehammer in a room full of sleeping puppies. Although the inverse of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) it makes its predecessor look like a temperate Play School outing. The throbbing score by Aria Prayogi and Fajar Yuskemal is befitting the explosive, adrenaline charged rush that the film’s zeal for physical chaos inspires.
The slaughter is eye-popping, the flow of blood unremitting. The Raid (2012) pushes the envelope further than any American counterpart in recent memory. Wallow in the carnage with glee; this is the template to follow for years to come, and for its perpetrator, Gareth Evans, infamy and surely a long, fruitful career is assured.
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