I had seen the flashy trailers for this film. You know, the ones that promise you the most amazing experience of your life, the most incredible action, most spectacular fights, calligraphy, and so on. And to be honest, I wasn't all that intrigued. It took an article in Wired, of all places, to get me to want to see the movie, basically because they were very enthusiastic about the stunts in the film.
The movie plot is about as simple as it can get. Truckload of cops, tower block full of villains. Raid goes wrong and, instead of a clinical room by room pacification of the block, one false move results in things going crazy quite quickly. Enter the mad martial arts.
Pencak silat is an Indonesian fighting form it forms, apparently possibly derived from watching a monkey fighting a tiger. Having watched The Raid, I can believe it. The fighting in the movie is really intense.
At times I was actually reminded of some of the hand-to-hand struggles in Saving Private Ryan - us that desperate and intense. It's fast too, but this is not the speedily choreographed kung fu of a Jackie Chan flick, designed to amuse as much as amaze. This is brutal, dirty, survival fighting. It is clear these are moves aimed at maiming or killing an opponent.
There is one scene near the start of the movie where we see the hero, played by Iko Uwais, practising against a dummy. After a few genre-typical situps and stretches, I'll let's rip with a blistering number of punches and strikes to the dummy. At thus point I remembered hearing they used to have to slow down footage of Bruce Lee, so the audience could see he had in fact thrown a punch. But then I wonder if Bruce would have approved of the sheer graphic nature of the violence in a film like The Raid.
I looked away at a couple of points when it was clear we were just building up to a killer applying the coup de grace to a brutalised opponent (victim?). And there were other times when it felt like I might actually be watching a particularly bad piece of Saw-sequel fanfic - way too much blood and gore onscreen than is at all necessary to make the point someone one a fight.
It just seems a little out of place in a film that is really as superficial and throwaway as The Raid. Make no mistake, I'm not saying it's a bad film. It's just not a serious film, like Private Ryan is.
The Raid could be a serious hit without it. The acting, such as there is, what with all the fighting in the film, is good enough. The characters are all sufficiently well written to get the piece moving along and it's all competently directed and all. But that slightly nasty, sadistic side to some of the violence will probably stop The Raid being more than a cult hit for fans of Asian fight flicks.
Not a bad way to spend a fiver and a couple of hours on a Tuesday night, but not the greatest action or martial arts movie to come out of Asia in recent times either. Certainly not one for date night or watching with the kids either.
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