A few weeks ago, I let out a long, tired sigh as I watched “Wrath of the Titans.” It was full of spectacle, but I have grown bored of movies that appear to have been generated in a computer, with artists inserting only bits and pieces of human beings into the action.
Part of why I enjoyed “Drive” and “Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol” as much as I did had to do with the physicality of the action. “Drive” contained some of the best car stunts of any film in years, and in “Mission Impossible,” Tom Cruise actual clung to the side of the world’s tallest building in Dubai! Who cares about a thousand foot tall Transformer leveling Chicago? Can we please shelf the cartoons and get back to making movies?
Now comes an Indonesian film that’s like a shot of pure adrenaline in the veins of this action junkie. Called “The Raid: Redemption,” it offers 101 minutes of meticulously choreographed and wildly creative hand-to-hand combat. In fight after fight, the actors unleash brutal fury upon each other and pull off countless unforgettable stunts. I would have thought it was impossible to execute some of the moves, but you can watch documentaries online showing director Gareth Evans filming them.
An example: An unarmed man is trapped in a tight hallway with four machete-wielding thugs. Our hero runs at his adversaries, screaming, and begins the long process of creating a pile of dead bodies. At some point during the fight, a wooden door is shattered, leaving only a jagged bottom section intact. To end the fight, the protagonist grabs his final enemy by the head, jumps backwards off the wall opposite the door and brings his opponent’s neck down on the long splinters. Evans shows remarkable stunt this without breaking the shot.
Even more impressive, Evans sustains this level of ingenuity throughout the movie without resorting to cheap tricks. In most fight movies, the hero will only have to deal with a single combatant at a time, while the other participants standing politely to the side until it’s their turn to attack. Not in “The Raid.” In the above scene, all four assailants simultaneously attack our hero, who must use all of his faculties at once to survive.
What’s more, the continuity from shot to shot is nearly perfect. If someone does a roundhouse kick to an opponent’s face, and Evans cuts to another camera mid-kick, the leg will be in the same spot in the second shot, with no lost momentum. In “The Raid,” Evans is like a mad seamstress stitching together a panorama of unbroken violence.
Also extraordinary is how Evans accomplishes this level of resourcefulness in a square 30-story building. With nothing but dingy corridors and dilapidated apartments as a setting, Evans keeps the action fresh, and each confrontation builds on the last one until the movie culminates in an intense two-on-one battle in an empty room.
A reasonably lucid story provides the framework for the fights. “The Raid” opens with its only quiet moment: a member of a SWAT team wakes up, exercises, puts on his gear, kisses his pregnant wife, and then before leaving his home, tells his father, “I will bring him back.”
He then joins his unit in the back of an armored truck enroute to a derelict apartment building that has become a safe house for a notorious gangster named Jakarta. Their mission: make their way past a legion of brutes to Jakarta and either arrest him or take him out. There are some nice twists along the way, but these bones are all Evans needs to hang the meat of the action.
Because of the emphasis in “The Raid” on action, Evans develops his characters quickly. I especially like the way he introduces Jakarta. What kind of a man would choose a hammer over bullets when dispatching someone?
“The Raid” isn’t perfect. The gun battles lack originality, and there’s no way the human body can sustain the kind of punishment these men administer to each other. But it sure beats a thousand foot Transformer leveling Chicago. If you like action, find this movie and see it.
Rated R for strong, brutal, bloody violence. Three-and-a-half stars out of four. Email David Laprad a dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.