#24 — The Raid
The is an illustrated countdown of my 49 1/2 most essential action movies, the standard number for countdowns. Last week I talked about one of the best action movies ever featuring animals that also has one of the worst titles — John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum.
The Raid might have single-handedly revived the mainstream celebration of pure, uncompromising action cinema. It was as if everyone had to be reminded “oh yeah, these are fun to watch”. It set the tone for the 2010s, storming over to the genre’s bedside, throwing a bucket of water on its face, and yelling at it to start doing pushups in a Sergeant Hartman voice. The genre listened. Originally an Indonesian release simply title “The Raid”, it came to the United States as “The Raid: Redemption” — which doesn’t seem to make sense until you realize it came out the same year as Taken 2. It was redeeming our precious action movies from a wayward life of delinquency.
This really felt like an instant classic for me when I first watched it, and time has validated that thought. Every stylistic touch was coming from a place that felt fresh. A director with his own unique vision, and a talented team of martial artists I had to immediately familiarize myself with were among the many reasons it caught people’s attention. I think it garnered some misplaced Die Hard comparisons when it released (people trapped in a building and whatnot), but I see it as one of the great action/horror hybrids. It reminds me a lot of Neil Marshall’s “The Descent”, which is about a group of women that go spelunking and find things that want to kill them. This one is about a group of SWAT cops that go spelunking in an apartment block, but you’ll never guess what happens instead.
The cherub-faced Iko Uwais plays Rama, and he is the Leonardo to John McClane’s Raphael, or Stanley Goodspeed’s Donatello (I haven’t thought about who Michelangelo would be, but perhaps Bullet Calzone could solve that problem). His mastery of Silat was also a relatively new thing for American audiences. I wasn’t familiar with it prior to the film, but in the movie it’s showcased with a graceful brutality comparable to Muay Thai, while feeling a tad improvisational.
The longer it goes on the more things descend into a scrappy free-for-all. The characters and narrative are baked into the action, and the score captures a visceral, raucous tone that complements everything perfectly.
I like how the horror elements help inform the visual storytelling. You can plainly see they walked into a trap, so nobody has to explain the why or how of it. They gotta figure that part out as they go along, same as us — and the only way out is through. Sometimes they don’t want to fight at all. Rama goes to great lengths to avoid a group of machete carrying goons, and when he has to finally confront them it’s exhilarating. Iko is a great physical performer, and I think this method of storytelling serves him and the entire cast so much better than the bloated sequel that would follow. Nobody is ever standing around consulting matters at hand, it’s just fight-or-flight for 100 minutes.
Action protagonists are often portrayed as people who are supposed to dominate and win. Their path to victory is typically a matter of firepower. Horror protagonists often deal with something a little more existential, something they might survive — but not without scars and uncertainty. It’s weird that these two genres don’t mingle a bit more when violence itself is such a horrific thing. It helps that Iko doesn’t look anything like the archetypical movie tough guy. He conveys fear and apprehension, even when elbow striking someone into oblivion. Rama’s battle for survival makes his actual job seem so trivial. This is one of the true marks of horror, that it strips away what a person used to be and fills that void with something more intangible. Even in victory, the corruption of the system is waiting outside the walls that confine him. His real enemy is something he can’t even hope to defeat.
The ending is very satisfying for me, in a slasher horror kinda way. There’s something powerful about seeing a character come out the other end of something crazy and unexpected, usually in the form of those One Long Night stories or something with a single location. It also comes with the looming thought of “what happens now?” I think the simple, visceral stories of this nature allow the idea of possibility to breathe without weighing things down with answers — often unsatisfying. I mentioned The Raid 2 earlier, and this might get me stoned, but I don’t think it’s suited to follow up a movie like this. I respect its ambition and much of the action is tremendous. It just doesn’t have the same instinctual drive.
I truly believe Gareth Evans captured some lightning in a bottle that nobody, not even himself, has been able to fully harness again. Maybe a Raid franchise would work better with a new protagonist for each one, a different POV of the same world. Cast the same actors in different parts, make Joe Taslim a twin brother like Chow Yun-fat in A Better Tomorrow II, make Julie Estelle the Jill Valentine of this new action/horror enterprise, and I dunno, call it “The Raids” — sort of the Aliens to The Raid’s Alien. Actually, The Raid is both the Alien AND the Aliens to the Raid’s Alien. I’m going to have to rethink this. No more Raids until this gets sorted out. What we have here is enough, for now.
