While making it, he met Iko Uwais, who’d been working as a delivery driver. So he moved with his wife to Indonesia, where he’d been hired to make a documentary about pencak silat. He’d made one unreleased movie, and he was working office jobs to pay bills. Even the airport throwdown in Captain America: Civil War brought some of that sense of speed and physicality, even if we knew we were watching pixels and not Indonesian stuntmen.Ī few years before he made The Raid, the Welsh director Gareth Evans had been going nowhere, unable to get his career off the ground. So does the incredible bathroom brawl from this past summer’s Mission: Impossible-Fallout. The hallway fight from the first season of Netflix’s Daredevil plays like a three-minute homage to The Raid. You can see the impact of The Raid in American movies like the John Wick films or Atomic Blonde. After The Raid, fight scenes, even in American movies, became faster and more visceral. A few punches, filmed shakily and edited blurrily, wouldn’t cut it anymore.
Rama the raid movie#
The Raid worked as a challenge to anyone who would stage a movie fight scene afterward. It stays raw and urgent, and it never lets up. But The Raid took those tendencies, amped them up even further, and stripped away the sentimental plot contrivances so common in Asian action cinema. In The Raid, Iko Uwais and his co-stars built on things that stars like Tony Jaa and Donnie Yen had been doing in movies like Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior and SPL: Kill Zone. In martial arts movies, performers are always trying to one-up each other, to come up with the most explosive and memorable movies. The movie belongs to a long, evolving tradition of Asian action movies, which stretches back more than a half century. There had been great movie fights before The Raid, of course. It’s a movie you can’t watch without wincing. And the performers in The Raid truly put themselves through hell, throwing themselves around hallways and staircases, through windows, off balconies. The combatants become tangled blurs of twisted limbs, everyone bleeding all over everyone else. Beholding it on-screen is like watching a great UFC fight in fast-forward. The fighters in The Raid are all practitioners of pencak silat, an Indonesian martial art that emphasizes-at least in these movies-nasty elbow and knee strikes. And its true legacy is those fast, jarring, brutal fights. The most quiet or reflective the movie gets is the scene where Rama, the fresh-faced hero cop played by the Indonesian martial artist Iko Uwais, is trapped with a wounded comrade in an apartment’s crawl space, trying to stay silent and undetected while some maniac stabs the wall with a machete. Instead, all we get is the fight-the frantic, feverish struggle to survive. There is no redemption in The Raid: Redemption. The Raid: Redemption, the Indonesian fight epic that had its American release in 2012, does away with almost everything that you’d expect to see in an action movie: the romantic subplot, the family saved, the hero’s journey to redemption. It’s less narrative arc, more 101-minute fight scene. The cops’ communications are cut off, and they have no way of escaping, so all they can do is shoot and kick and punch their way to the top of this building, taking on wave after wave of attackers. The entire building is populated with criminals who work for that drug lord, so they’re doing their best to kill the cops.
There sits a drug lord who wants all of them dead. What it has is a setup: A squad of armored cops has to fight its way from the bottom of a dilapidated apartment tower to the top. The most influential action movie of this decade doesn’t have a plot.
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