Release Date: Click HERE for release info by country.
Written and Directed by: Gareth Evans.
Starring: Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, and a scrappy lil' son of a bitch named Yayan Ruhian.
The Raid: Redemption is purely an action movie, no horror involved at all (unless you count gratuitous violence and copious amounts of blood), but we just had to take a minute to give it some love.
In horror terms, it's reminiscent of The Horde; where a small group of people are trapped in an apartment building and are forced to fight their way through a crazy horde of zombies in order to escape the death trap they're in. In The Raid, the zombies are replaced with some vicious Indonesian gangsters, and the people that are trapped and forced to fight their way out are Indonesian cops. It's also way more violent and bloody, and by the end, I think there were more corpses lying around... more corpses than a zombie movie. Think about that one.
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| They have guns, should be no problem... |
It's not often that a movie comes a long and just blows us away, especially when we're talking about the action genre; most action flicks are good, but don't really tend to dazzle or excite us. We've seen so many action movies over the years that we're fairly jaded on the subject. I takes a lot to get our fists pumping and even more to get us to hoot and holler during a movie, especially in public... we generally try to behave and not look like super nerds when amongst strangers.
The Raid: Redemption was so awesome that it made us stand up in the theater and throw karate kicks into the air, while yelling "Hyah!" (*That didn't really happen, but in our hearts it did.)
It's really hard to explain how crazy and action packed The Raid truly is, because at some point while trying to explain it, we'd end up sounding like we're just way over exaggerating things. A week removed from seeing The Raid, with emotion taken out of the equation and our heads calm and clear, we can say that the movie was so full of insane, bloody, mind blowing action, that we honestly can't think of any other movie in recent memory that comes close to its level. Not even kinda close.
It's honestly one of the best martial arts flicks we've ever seen. Ever.
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| The little guy on the right, Mad Dog, not only kicked crazy amounts of ass on screen, but was the movie's fight choreographer too. We love him. |
So intense, unrelenting and overtly bloody and violent was The Raid, that a woman in our small screening audience said "I can't take any more, it's exhausting!" She wasn't being dramatic at all. The level of graphic violence in this movie is through the roof, and by the end, even we the audience felt as if we'd been through the same hell that just unfolded on screen.
It seems as though lately if we're in the mood for a really good thriller or action flick, that countries like Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea, HK or Japan (among other Asian/Pacific Island countries) are doing them better than anyone else in the world. For an American viewer like me, they films from these countries seem a bit odd or different in some ways, but they always seem to find a way to entertain, dazzle and often times disturb me in great ways. They do it different there, and Hollywood really ought to take note of what makes the average Asian flick so good, and maybe try to emulate them a bit more, instead of remaking already great movies in a sub par way. I shudder to think what Hollywood is going to do to Oldboy, even with Spike Lee at the helm.
Indonesia just gave the world an action masterpiece. You really should go out of your way to find The Raid and enjoy the hell out of it.
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| Does every guy with dreadlocks always have a machete on them? |
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