The Raid Redemption

Product Description Deep in the heart of Jakarta's slums lies an impenetrable safe house for the world's most dangerous killers and gangsters. Until now, the rundown apartment block has been considered untouchable. Cloaked under the cover of pre-dawn darkness and silence, an elite swat team is tasked with raiding the safe house in order to take down the notorious drug lord that runs it. But when a chance encounter with a spotter blows their cover and news of their assault reaches the drug lord, they find themselves stranded on the 6th floor with no way out. The unit must fight their way through the city's worst to survive their mission. Amazon.com A lid-flippingly kinetic blast, this martial arts marvel from Indonesia proves you don't need huge budgets or CGI assists to craft a top-tier action film. Writer-director Gareth Evans's ( Merantau) plot turns on a fiendishly simple hook: a SWAT team mounts an assault on a mob-controlled apartment building, only to meet with heavy resistance from the machete-favoring tenants. That's it, really, but even a step-by-step recap would prove incapable of conveying the ridiculous, escalating carnage that Evans and his star/action choreographer Iko Uwais pack into virtually every inch of their cramped location. (The music score wisely references John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, which shares the same claustrophobic ingenuity.) While the sheer amount of rewind-worthy set pieces on display are undoubtedly the main selling point here, they would be unlikely to make as much of an impact without Evans's intelligently spartan directorial style, which takes a clean, no-frills approach to everything in the film not directly involving people getting kicked in the head. (Aspiring filmmakers should take note of how everything we need to know about Uwais's main character--his fierce family loyalty, his devout religious faith, his ability to punch at roughly the speed of light--is shown within the very first scene.) By the time The Raid's final fight--a brutal three-way death match in a room slightly larger than a broom closet--rolls around, it's hard not to feel a bit exhausted from the infernal, unceasing rush. The majority of viewers, however, should find it to be a pleasant kind of exhaustion, of the sort that comes from watching an action movie that knows exactly what it's trying to achieve. From nearly the first frame until the last, it achieves a state of perpetual motion. --Andrew Wright