Of all the unique capabilities of film as an art form, I think you can make a decent case that the most significant innovation—the biggest game-changer in the way we entertain ourselves—is its ability to record and depict exceptional physical feats. There have always been people who push the boundaries of human physical capability, but before film, their exploits were always more legendary than famous. The work of great storytellers could be set down in writing, great music could be reproduced, great visual art could still be seen long after the artist was gone—but until the 20th century, unless you were physically present at a circus or a sporting event, you couldn’t truly experience the achievements of great athletes and acrobats. Words can describe these things in great detail, but only moving pictures can fully capture the power and grace of a great physical performance. Our appetite for this sort of thing is seemingly boundless, and unlikely to diminish anytime soon. Look no further than the massive share of TV content devoted to live professional sports and feats of daredevilry, and the enduring, widespread popularity of action movies. From The Great Train Robbery way back in 1903 to the breathtaking comic stunts of Buster Keaton to the high-octane blowouts of modern times, we simply can’t get enough of those genre-defining physical extremes that are, for most of us, mercifully absent from real life: chases, battles, explosions, fights and shootouts.
It would be hard to find a purer, more exuberant expression of this than The Raid: Redemption, a 2011 Indonesian martial arts flick that’s (almost) entirely about the spectacle of bodies in thrilling, violent motion. (Quick note: If you’re thinking that Redemption sub-title is a bit silly, the filmmakers would probably agree; it was added for rather banal legal reasons, and from now on, I’ll refer to the movie by its intended title The Raid.[i]) We should say up front: this is clearly not everyone’s cup of tea. If you see no appeal in watching a few dozen people shot, stabbed, kicked, punched, and otherwise violently dispatched, no matter how beautifully it’s all put together, then this movie isn’t for you and makes no attempt to persuade you otherwise. But for those of us who do enjoy such spectacles, The Raid is a glorious breath of fresh air; it knows what we’re here for, and seeks only to deliver the goods as expertly as possible. Made for the relative pittance of $1.1 million,[ii] it runs for a lean 100 minutes, the vast majority of which contain ‘action’ in some form or another. The setup is almost primal in its simplicity: a police squad is trapped in a tower run by a ruthless drug lord, and must fight their way out or die trying. It’s a prime example of the so-called ‘worst day ever’ movie, which could technically describe a pretty wide range of work, but is traditionally applied to action flicks that trap their heroes in some restricted space to fight off hordes of homicidal enemies, from Die Hard (1988) to Black Hawk Down (2001) to Judge Dredd (1995) and its underrated 2012 remake Dredd. The dialogue is sparse, and mostly restricted to the exclamations of amped-up combatants: “He’s here!”, “No, wait!”, “Get me the fuck out of here!”, etc. The characters are developed just enough to technically register as characters, capably filling archetypal roles: skilled but green rookie; tough-as-nails sergeant; enemy leader with complex loyalties; wounded comrade who must be saved; cold-blooded killer with a perverse sense of honor. While there is some CGI—muzzle flashes, bullet casings, presumably (hopefully?) some of the more egregious impacts and injuries—in an era where far too much action is nothing but zeroes and ones, The Raid offers the inimitable thrills of real performers in real space, dazzling us with stunts and acrobatic maneuvers that few normal people could even attempt. And most importantly in this genre, it’s all clear as day, shot and assembled with exceptional care and skill.
The story behind it is nearly as fun as the movie itself. It begins not in Indonesia, but in Wales, where a young film school graduate named Gareth Evans, probably feeling a bit unfulfilled teaching Welsh over the Internet, “sidestepped an apprenticeship in the British film industry by moving to Jakarta.”[iii] I doubt that was his exact thought process, but in any case, he makes the move and becomes fascinated with the place and its culture. He gets hired to direct a documentary about pencak silat, an Indonesian variant of the Silat style of martial arts practiced throughout Southeast Asia. There, he meets Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian, pencak silat champions then making their livings as a truck driver and a trainer, respectively. Evans hires them as actors and fight choreographers on his next film, Merantau (2009), which becomes a hit in Asia and among martial arts buffs—clearing the way for the trio to try something more ambitious, if still far removed from Hollywood action extravagance.[iv]
The result is The Raid, a movie with an interesting blend of influences reflecting its unique origins. Low-budget Silat action movies are apparently a fixture of Southeast Asian cinema, and while they’re little known (and probably impossible to even access) in the West, Evans is surely familiar with the subgenre, and seeking to channel some of its best features. The movie also exhibits many defining elements of Asian action cinema as a whole: the commitment to live stunts, the reduction of plot and character to the most basic necessities, and a preoccupation with honor and integrity even in the midst of violence and chaos that would seem to render them obsolete. At the same time, the influence of Western action cinema is also evident in the filming techniques; the macho, profanity-laden dialogue (“When it comes to the lives of my men, you’d be wise to shut the fuck up!”); and in the depiction of violence with (relative) realism, as opposed to the more stylized/comic approach of Asian stars like Bruce Lee or Jackie Chan. The juxtaposition of these differing aesthetics could have been awkward, but the streamlined simplicity of the plot helps keep things tonally consistent; as Andrew O’Hehir writes, “there’s not the slightest iota of snarky, jokey, postmodern pastiche in The Raid. It never feels like a tougue-in-cheek, Tarantino-style East-West hybrid… and if you didn’t know the director was British, you’d never guess it from the internal evidence.”[v] The movie is informed to some degree by Evans’ Western sensibilities, but he’s careful to let it remain an Indonesian film at its core.
Evans does exemplary work (more on that in a bit), but the success of The Raid is rooted first and foremost in the remarkable talent of its performers. There’s a certain ineffable quality, I find, to the movements of truly exceptional athletes: Michael Jordan, Jackie Chan, Simone Biles, Mookie Betts, Kylian Mbappé, and countless others who noticeably stand out even among their professional peers. They’re not always the fastest or the strongest, but they move with a seemingly instinctive efficiency, each motion flowing into the next, constantly calibrated for maximum efficacy—when they jump, they seem to hang in the air longer than the rest. We see that same quality in the martial-arts stars of The Raid: Uwais as our rookie hero Rama, and Ruhian as the psychotic enemy enforcer Mad Dog, whose moniker is so apt that we never learn his actual name. One of them is centrally featured in each of the fight sequences, giving us ample time to marvel at their skill and creativity; there’s an internal rhythm to the choreography that makes it all the more gripping, and every sequence contains multiple moves that would be the climactic capstone of a lesser action movie. We can even begin to register subtle differences in their fighting styles—Rama more focused on precision and anticipation, turning his enemies’ attacks back on themselves, and Mad Dog, described by one critic as “the closest the movies may ever come to a live action Tasmanian devil,”[vi] more about speed and athleticism, turning his entire body into a weapon—making it all the more stunning when they finally square off against each other. And it’s not just them; several supporting actors, all with varying levels of martial arts training, are also given central roles in the action and prove to be thrilling fighters in their own right: Joe Taslim as Sergeant Jaka, Donny Alamsyah as Rama’s estranged brother Andi, and Eka Rahmadia as the skilled police officer Dagu. And of course, there’s also the rest of the police squad and the thugs on the receiving end of Rama’s prodigious ass-kicking—dozens of anonymous stunt performers who have the different but equally difficult job of not only performing their moves, but also convincingly acting out the brutal hits, throws and maimings that their parts entail. The violence is harrowing, but so impressively performed that it’s wondrous to behold.
It also helps that the insane stuff these guys are doing is so expertly assembled onscreen. Directing action is a highly specific skill, one that some of the most accomplished filmmakers struggle with, and if it’s done poorly, no amount of ebudgetary largesse or post-production wizardry can really save the sequence. There could be (and probably have been) entire books written about action film theory, and obviously the best directors put a great deal of thought into every moment of their sequences, but I also believe that just as some people are naturally gifted musicians, builders, writers, or anything else, certain directors simply have an instinctive feel for action. It’s not restricted to any particular style; Paul Greengrass uses quick-cutting shaky-cam, Kathryn Bigelow goes for docudrama realism, George Miller has his smoothly roving camera, and Jackie Chan uses carefully sequenced static framing, but they all have that seemingly innate talent for creating exhilarating, visually coherent action sequences. Watching The Raid, it’s clear that Gareth Evans has it, too.
Which is not to say we can’t identify some of the technique and decision-making behind it. First, Evans keeps things quite visually consistent; the movie was filmed mostly with a Fig Rig, a steering-wheel-like mount for smal digital cameras that produces images somewhere in between the jerkiness of handheld and the less maneuverable smoothness of a true Steadicam. So almost all the shots are fundamentally similar: halfway between shaky and steady, mostly at standing eye level, prowling nervously around the edges of the fight. The angles change regularly and sometimes quite rapidly, but the perspective is almost always the same: that of a bystander watching the fight at a close remove. Because of this, our eyes don’t have to make split-second adjustments to a new type of image, like a handheld close-up or a static wide shot—we have a rudimentary idea of what we’re going to see next even before it comes. When he does go to something different, typically a near-static wide shot or one looking down on the action from above, the motion of the camera or the figures in the frame always leads smoothly into it. In general, Evans also frames his shots wider than many action directors; we can usually see multiple combatants, and enough of their bodies to tell what they’re doing. The camera moves feel intuitive, reflecting the way we would shift our gaze if we were actually there watching the fight. Evans also takes special care to keep the action in or near the center of the frame, so that when he cuts, our eyes don’t have to scan the image for the thing they’re supposed to be focusing on. Some cuts might seem unnecessary in the moment (‘That shot was fine; why change it?”), and some significantly alter the point of view, shifting a full 180 degrees around the fight, but whenever that happens, Evans is setting up the next moment, making an upcoming camera move or combat flourish easier to register.
Most notable of all is what Evans doesn’t do, and here again, the skills of his cast are crucial. In lesser, merely passable Western action movies, the stars typically don’t have the skills to convincingly perform all the moves, especially when it comes to taking hits. So in addition to using shaky close-ups to exaggerate motion, they’ll often cut right on the hit; it’s a tried-and-true way to paper over the impact, stitching together the beginning and end of it without showing the whole thing. But it’s also visually confusing, asking us to register something that we didn’t actually see, because it didn’t actually happen—and cutting exclusively for that reason. If that happens a lot, as it often does in movies where it’s necessary, it wrecks the visual coherence of the action, and the sequence becomes exhausting rather than exciting. Evans, even when he’s cutting rapidly, almost never cuts on impact, because he doesn’t have to; his performers are good enough to make the fight convincing without disguising anything. Their skill means that Evans can cut in the softer moments between the hits, complementing the rhythm of the fight rather than working against it, and that he’s always able to show the most awesome stunts—the crescendos in that combat rhythm—in a single shot, so we can see clearly how amazing they are.
Nevertheless, coherent action isn’t the only thing Evans does exceptionally well. The Raid is often described as constant, unrelenting action, and that’s accurate, but it’s not pure martial arts combat from start to finish. The fight sequences are numerous, but they’re also clearly demarcated, and relatively short compared to the overall runtime. The key is what occurs between them; Evans has fun devising sequences that are relatively simple to film (no real ‘stunts’ to speak of) but still keep the tension relentlessly ratcheted up. He never uses slow-motion in the fights, but he makes judicious use of it to draw out two key moments early on: once when a sentry just barely relays word of their presence before they silence him, and once when an ill-timed muzzle flash betrays their position to gunmen lurking in the darkness above. Otherwise, Evans almost never strays from the quasi-Steadicam type of images that he uses in the action sequences, infusing the rest of the movie with a similar tense energy. The early scenes of the police infiltrating the tower are, in their own way, just as thrilling as the fight scenes that follow, because they’re filmed in much the same way. Once the mission goes awry, whenever our characters get a reprieve from the fighting, the nervously hovering camera keeps us on edge, reminding of the danger that might lurk behind every door. Evans devises some very effective sequences of cat-and-mouse tension, mostly involving Alfridus Godfred as the leader of the machete gang, who becomes a menacing presence long before he fights or says anything, repeatedly appearing in the frame just after the cops have left it, slowly tapping his machete against the tiles as he searches the bathroom where they’re hiding, and finally driving his blade through a wall behind which Rama and his wounded comrade are hiding.
This is another advantage to the simplicity of Evans’ premise: our police protagonists are trapped in a building full of criminals who want to kill them. There’s no nuance between the sides, no negotiation; the second the thugs spot the cops, they’re after them with murderous intensity. As in a real-life war or ‘action’ scenario like this, there’s no clear dividing line between combat and rest, and it never feels like our characters are truly safe. There are only a few scenes—the kingpin Tama strategizing with his two lieutenants, and the conversation between Rama and Andi—where we don’t feel the imminent threat of violence breaking out at any moment.
The story may be aggressively simple, but that doesn’t mean the constant intensity is the only interesting thing about the movie. Evans does a good job of making the narrative just involving enough to leave us with a little bit to think about besides the action badassery. As Western viewers, we don’t learn much about Indonesia except that corruption is a problem, which isn’t exactly a shocking revelation in that or any other part of the world. But it’s still fun to listen to the lively rhythms of the Indonesian language, and to get even a vague, genre-specific sense of a place that most of us know next to nothing about, even though it’s the fourth-most populous country in the world. The plot twists are predictable, but interesting enough to pay attention to, and as the story goes on, they change up the combat dynamics in entertaining ways. Moreover, as primal as the battle between police and thugs is, Evans does allow for some gray areas: some of the police are cruel or corrupt, some of the thugs fight honorably when they have the choice not to. Not a groundbreaking sentiment, but certainly more satisfying than the rah-rah bellicosity that often defines action movies, especially those that go as all-out on the violence and mayhem as this one does.
At the end of the day, though, the story isn’t what anyone watches a movie like this for, and Evans knows it. We watch it to be amazed, and he delivers on that expectation many times over. There’s violence in The Raid, so much ghastly violence, but Evans, Uwais, Ruhian and their small army of committed artists make it as beautiful and exhilarating as anything you’ll see at the movies—and for a tiny fraction of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Forget whatever Transformers sequel some studio just paid $200 million for. In a hundred years, The Raid will still be blowing people’s minds. ◊
© Harrison Swan, 2019
[i] Apparently the distributor, Sony Pictures Classics, was somehow unable to secure rights to the title The Raid, so they had to tack something on to release the movie in the U.S. The original Indonesian title is Serbuan maut, and I think it would have been great if they’d simply gone with the literal translation: The Deadly Raid.
[ii] My favorite stat: that’s less that the cost per minute of your typical Transformers flick, which makes the fact that The Raid is so much more entertaining than that garbage all the more satisfying.
[iii] From a good review: https://www.npr.org/2012/03/22/148945789/the-raid-hand-to-hand-thrills-in-a-jakarta-slum
[iv] There’s actually a good chance you’ve seen Uwais and Ruhian before, if only briefly. A few years ago, I was thrilled to see their names among the cast of Star Wars: The Force Awakens—but all they were allowed to do was bark a few menacing lines at Han Solo and then get eaten by a monster, which has got to be the most inexcusably wasteful cameo in recent memory. Oh, what they could have done with lightsabers…
[v] Also insightful and informative: https://www.salon.com/2012/03/23/pick_of_the_week_a_dazzling_martial_arts_sensation/
[vi] Also very good, like all of Ty Burr’s reviews: http://archive.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2012/03/30/the_raid_redemption_movie_review____the_raid_redemption_showtimes/
ReWatch List 