Level Up

Stop me if this sounds familiar: Tama (Ray Sahetapy), a crime lord, has based himself in a run-down, 30-storey building in inner city Jakarta. A police task team is dispatched to take out this man, who in the film’s opening minutes executes a handful of men with such detachments that we cannot help but align with the police. The team is headed by Jaka (Joe Taslim), but the film’s focus is mainly on the physically unimposing Rama (Iko Kuwais), a rookie member of the team. Getting inside the criminal’s hideout is easy, but then bodies start to pile up on both sides and it seems that the job isn’t a simple takedown after all. Even if they get to Tama, he’s guarded by two much feared men, one of whom is appropriately called Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian).

To say that The Raid is the new pinnacle of Asian action cinema is to say that it takes a familiar set-up (reminiscent of Die Hard, for example), clothes it with the minimum plot and story and then sets out to reconstitute our expectations of what action films can viscerally achieve. The last time physical combat alone elevated a film to near awe-inspired breathlessness, it was Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. But The Raid and Crouching Tiger are worlds apart; while the latter laces its intrigue with mythology and romance, The Raid has one relentless drive: invigorating action set in closed and confined spaces. What happens in The Raid makes combat choreography in most other genre films seem positively geriatric by example, and the film had me scratching my head, wondering “how did they do that?”, on a number of occasions.

The film’s detractors will point to the film’s lack of story, and they are not entirely wrong; Rama has a personal motivation for getting this particular job done, but that’s about it. Plus, the twist towards the end is entirely expected. Yet the film is so frenetic and so focused on delivering visceral combat – much like some video games – that the lack of depth is forgivable. Importantly, the action never reaches the level of tedium that has in the past torpedoed many other action films; think of the Ong Bak movies, which have more developed stories than The Raid but are far less memorable.

Director Gareth Evans, a Welshman, has with The Raid presented an exhilarating entry into contemporary action cinema by taking the genre back to its fist-to-fist basics and injecting it with silat, an Indonesian martial art so fluid and fast it seems to remap the possibilities of the body in violent motion. With its seamless combination of CGI and astounding physical stunt work, The Raid left me breathless. An American remake is already underway.