Before audience members see any part of Welsh director Gareth Huw Evans’s “The Raid: Redemption,” they hear a ticking sound. The image that finally accompanies the sound is a shirtless man exercising, doing crunches and pushups, and kickboxing, each contraction of the muscles captured.
In hindsight, one realizes the relation between these two sensory items, that this man is the ticking time bomb whose sheer force is about to be unleashed.
That man also happens to be the film’s star and Indonesian martial arts sensation Iko Uwais, who plays SWAT officer Rama. “The Raid” marks his second collaboration with Evans.
As with their debut work, “Merantau,” which introduced the world to the Indonesian martial art known as Silat, this film showcases the heart-pounding and bone-crushing intensity of the fighting discipline. Surprisingly, the film is also an engaging tale about justice and the law and good versus evil, with a dash of family values and sentiment.
Set in an Indonesian slum in the heart of Jakarta, “The Raid” chronicles an elite SWAT team’s covert mission to seize and capture a rundown apartment building and its sleazy yet powerful gangster landlord.
This is serious stuff. For one, Tama, the gangster being pursued, is an untouchable target who evaded practically all the other neighborhood gangs, not to mention the police. It is because of these tremendous odds against them that one officer questions why they have been chosen to undertake this impossible task at this time.
Though the question may seem to be merely the whiny aside of an officer fearing for his life, answering it becomes the film’s main occupation and the source of most of its drama. In the meantime, the officers manage a stealthy entry into the building, but things take a turn for the deadly when a spotter reveals their presence. This initiates a memorable and brutal face-off between the police and a multitude of common criminals, a fight typical of good versus evil, or so it seems.
An initial shower of bullets leaves most of the officers dead, sparing and stranding only a few men, including protagonist Rama. Fortunately, these few lucky souls also happen to be seriously skilled fighters, so when the ammo runs out, they retreat to good old-fashioned hand-to-hand combat.
It is here that the film’s true beauty, the martial art form of Silat, shines brightest, delivering a series of exhilarating, dizzying and awe-inspiring scenes. In one scene, Rama deftly takes down an entire hallway of armed men one by one, decapitates a man in midair and breaks another literally in half with a skillful toss.
All this and more is before the last great fighting sequence, in which two unlikely allies take on an even more brutal fighter in the most gruesome threesome ever seen and the film’s most classic moment.
Yet deeply embedded in the action are some fascinating bits of storytelling, which, though sparse, play great roles in molding this epic tale. Telling moments, such as the discovery of an unlikely crooked cop and a familial link between dueling characters, keep viewers engaged even when the blows are not being thrown.
Equally gripping is the film’s stunningly dismal cinematography, which is quite evocative of a grimy Indonesian slum and the desperate fight for survival taking place.
Amazingly, for all the blood and gore -- of which there is an endless supply -- the film avoids the empty testosterone-fueled man-candy trap that most action flicks fall into, offering instead an earnest exposition on brute force and stark realism.
thescene@theeagleonline.com
