Movie Spoiler: The Raid: Redemption (Serbuan maut). Review follows. Welsh director Gareth Evan’s third feature film is an adrenaline rush that opens with a shot of a stop watch and a man praying. Another man (?) works out by first doing pull-ups. Rama (Iko Uwais) packs his gun and walks into his bedroom to wake up his wife (Fikha Effendi). He kisses her pregnant belly and says goodbye. He makes a promise to bring his brother back.
An armored vehicle drives through the rain carrying a SWAT team. Their mission is to take down drug lord Tama Riyadi (Ray Sahetapy), and his right hand men Andi (Doni Alamsyah) and Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian) holed up in safe house with fifteen floors full of the world’s most dangerous killers and gangsters. Andi is the brains behind the operation and Mad Dog is this pint-size merciless beast that will tear into anyone and anything. They watch over a slum building in the worst sense of the word that includes residents who are drug addicts and even those who can’t afford anything else.
Tama eats while flanked by Andi and Mad Dog. He pulls his gun out on five hostages on their knees in a row looking away from him. He kills three of them and when he holds up the gun to his fourth victim, he shoots, but the gun has run out of bullets. He saunters over to his desk and opens a drawer revealing bullets surrounded a hammer. He draws the new weapon.
Back in the van, the SWAT team prepares and the question is posed, “Why today?” Lieutenant Wahyu (Pierre Gruno) who ordered the raid is there waiting for the men. They break up into two teams and agree to meet inside after they infiltrate. One team picks a lock. The other team headed by Wahyu takes out a guard watching a TV. By chance, they run into a resident of apartment 726, Gofar (Iang Darmawan) on his way in to give his ailing wife medication. Against his will, they use him to enter and he must remain with them temporarily. They find three criminals and begin arrests quietly. Down the hallway, a youngster walks out of the bathroom and sees them. They boy runs and manages to make it to the stairwell. Wahyu fires a shot watched in slow motion and hits the boy in the neck. However, just before he’s hit, he sees his brother and alerts him about the SWAT team. They manage to take the brother down, but not before he’s able to sound the alarm.
In the surveillance room on the 15th floor, Tama watches several monitors. Andi walks in and orders a lock-down. Two snipers take out a SWAT member. And others start dying in a firestorm of bullets. One of the arrested men, manages to slip his tied hands from behind his back to his front and draws a knife hidden underneath the table and uses it to kill his captors. The driver and passenger of the armored van are taken down in a shooting frenzy. Another guy runs down the hallway pretended to have his hands tied behind his back only to produce a gun and shoot a SWAT member.
Tama has the building entrances sealed off and shuts down the electricity. Sergeant Jaka (Joe Taslim) tries to make radio contact with members of the other team, but fails. Tama makes a building-wide announcement via an intercom system and informs the SWAT of their imminent doom. Jaka presses Wahyu about who ordered the raid, as he now suspects that their arrival was expected. Wahyu insists that no one knew they were coming. There is a calm before a firestorm of artillery fire ensues.
In the surveillance room, Andi yells at Tama and Mad Dog. Tama ensures him that there will be no backup forces and every SWAT member will be destroyed. We also learn that Wahyu is an old rival of Tama.
The shootout continues. The team breaks into a room and secures it by blocking the door with vertically with a couch. One of the guys is covered in shards of glass when the window explodes. Another finds a hallow area in the floorboards and uses a pick axe to hack through it. As shots are fired at them and penetrate the couch, they escape to the room beneath them. Their time there is short lived when the criminals start shooting through the corresponding door. One of the men falls through another floor and gets stuck in the one he lands through. The criminals shower him with bullets. One guy has the bright idea to load the refrigerator with a gas tank. The men push it over to the door, throw a grenade inside, shut the fridge and run for cover as it explodes and blows away the criminals shooting at them.
Tama asks for a damage assessment. One of his men hacks to the death one of the soldiers with the pickaxe. After the explosion, one of the SWAT wakes up and quietly communicates with the others about their next move. They climb through the hole in the ceiling, right as the criminals enter.
Andi waits for the elevator with two cronies. Men with machetes roam the hallway hunting for SWAT. The leader trails off and starts kicking in room doors one by one. At the end of one corridor, with Wahyu and Dagu (Eka “Piranha” Rahmadia) hiding behind him, he draws a knife. He stops short, just missing the three. [4/25 Thank you to Sakamunga for corrections.]
Rama carries an injured SWAT and must fend off a slew of criminals as they make their way to Apartment #726, some of which he manages to kill without the use of the arm he’s using to transport the soldier. They keep coming at him, as he dispatched one after another. At one point, he has to leave the injured man behind. In one of his more memorable kills, he bangs a guy’s head three times down the side of a wall. As he slowly pulls himself down the hall, a wounded man lying there tries to attack him, and he stabs him dead. Rama recovers him and kills one more man with a gun.
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| Iko Uwais |
On the elevator, Andi kills the two men in his attendance. Outside, the criminals push away the annihilated van and pile the bodies up in a mound of SWAT. The resident tells Rama there is no way of escaping and he knows not of any secret passages. He ventures out into the 7th floor hallway littered with dead bodies. Some of them criminals spot him, but he effortlessly handles them, throwing one over a ledge whose fall is broken by the ledge below. Ouch! He finds himself trapped at the end of a hallway. The machete men and Rama run at each other and he begins taking them down, because he’s awesome that way. He impales one of the guys on the bottom of a shredded wooden doorway.
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| Iko Uwais |
Hiding in a room, Wahyu and Jaka argue over leaving Rama and his partner behind. When Wahyu won’t reveal who called the order, Jaka pulls rank and orders them to find Rama. Mad Dog finds them and has a standoff with Jaka. He orders Jaka into the room using his gun and kicks the door shut behind them. They drop their weapons and Mad Dog challenges him to a weaponless fight. After Jaka puts in a valiant effort, Mad Dog overpowers him. After a short methodical pause, he goes in for the kill and breaks his neck.
Andi washes his hands and talks with Rama. We learn that they are brothers who haven’t seen each other for six years. Rama wants to take Andi away from the drug business, but Andi insists on staying because it’s the only thing he’s ever been good at. He lights up when he learns he’s going to be an uncle, but it’s not enough for him to get him to leave. He clears the area for Rama’s escape.
Mad Dog drag’s Jaka’s body to the elevator and keeps it, despite Andi requesting that he leave it behind. Rama watches them board the elevator and walks down the 4th floor. Wahyu and Dagu pull Rama in. They want to leave, but Rama insists they stay and go to the 15th floor to do what they originally set out to do (or what he thought was the mission): take down Tama.
Mad Dog drops Jaka’s body in front of Tama. Tama asks Andi to show him his hands. His point is that they’re empty and he’s betrayed Tama. With Mad Dog’s help, he attacks him and pins his hand to the table with a knife and makes him watch footage of himself clearing area for his brother Rama. “Never underestimate the persistence of paranoia,” he tells him.
Gunman attack what’s left of the SWAT as they ascend to the 15th floor. In the drug lab, they start taking down the workers with some sick-ass moves. Rama grabs one of the guys mid-kick and uses the momentum to throw him against a post. He has a battle with another guy on an assembly-line table and it ends rather uneventfully with the guy clumsily slipping off.
Through a window to a mostly empty room, Rama sees his brother chained up hanging from the ceiling. Mad Dog beats him and when Rama enters, he discontinues the abuse and allows Rama to untie him. A fight commences with Mad Dog taking on the two brothers.
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| Iko Uwais |
The brothers run into Kahyu and Tama in stairwell. Kahyu shoots at the brothers and tells them to back off. Tama tells Kahyu that Reza called him, stopping Kahyu in his tracks. Kahyu was sent to the safe building to die. A successful mission was never planned. If he shows up alive, he will be killed. Kahyu shoots Tama dead. He tries to commit suicide, but, in a clever call back to an earlier scene, there are no bullets (the hammer of justice will be just fine). The brothers approach Kahyu and announcement is made that “it’s over.”
Andi gives Rama evidence that implicates all of the corrupt cops on the drug lord’s payroll. They take Wahyu and another injured SWAT outside. Andi lets them out and stays behind to his brother’s displeasure. There’s a bird’s-eye shot of the two brothers parting ways. Techno music kicks in and Rama safely leaves the premises with his men.
The Raid: Redemption Spoiler
The Raid: Redemption Movie Spoiler Summary
The Raid: Redemption Spoilers
The Raid: Redemption Spoiler Summary
The Raid: Redemption Plot Summary
Capsule Review
Filmed on a budget of roughly $1M, Welsh director Gareth Evans shows how far talent and creativity can take one with such limited funds. The production values are absolutely stellar and this movie pretty much rivals just about anything Hollywood has to offer (especially these days). I can’t even imagine what Evans could do with more money. Here, his fascination with the Indonesian martial art Pencak Silat is on full display. He wraps it up into a story about a SWAT team who get trapped inside of a safe house of a ruthless drug kingpin during a raid.
The movie stars newcomer Iko Uwais, a beautiful specimen of a man who is a native Jakartan Evans met while filming a documentary a few years back. His performance is dedicated and his martial arts talents are simply out of this world. As well, Ruhian as villain Mad Dog is like a bat out of Hell, unlike we’ve ever witnessed before. He could chew up and spit out just about any villain American filmmakers have put on screen in the history of cinema. “Mad Dog” is putting it lightly. He’s a pissed off fucking man-eating Rottweiler.
The writing is not always the strongest, as it stretches sometimes to provide motivation for its characters. Andi, the brains behind the operation, wouldn’t be stupid enough to risk his identity by making some of his choices in the building under heavy surveillance. And the brother-storyline and fatherhood-motivation sometimes feel a little tacked on. But expert editing, a pumping soundtrack and enthralling action pieces drive the whole story the whole time and there is rarely a dull moment, let alone an opportunity to catch your breath.
I don’t usually watch martial arts films, so my barometer for how this one ranks is untrustworthy. But, if you can handle graphic violence and love to watch well-orchestrated deaths set against an intensely extreme situations, you can do much worse than watch this movie in a theater near you.
[Pictures vis Rolling Stone Indonesia, Paperblog, Rupa Cupa]
[Pictures vis Rolling Stone Indonesia, Paperblog, Rupa Cupa]
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