THE RAID
From his penthouse eyrie, a Jakarta mafia boss oversees a run-down apartment block, which houses his drug labs and a militia of residents. But the drug lord’s life is far from glamorous: in windowless gloom Tama (Indonesian film veteran Ray Sahetapy) keeps vigil by his CCTV monitors with the abnormal zeal of Howard Hughes. His paranoia becomes real when a SWAT team storm the building and trigger an army out to protect their landlord.
The Raid developed out of abandoned plans to shoot a documentary about the Indonesian martial art Pencak Silat. Many of the cast are expert martial artists with limited acting experience. Yet, for all this, it’s not until halfway into the film, by which time the ammunition runs out and the support cast have been graphically blown off the screen, that we eventually see any martial arts. Also, it is only at this point that director Gareth Evans starts to develop characters: two brothers are facing up to one another on opposing sides and a veteran cop reveals himself to be a figure of corruption.
Despite a lack of dialogue and an excess of gore, I preferred the first half of this uneven film. The action scenes are fast-paced, tense and tightly choreographed. The second-half is much slower, with the dream sequences of a fearful cop and the slow-mo of hand-to-hand fight sequences. (CH) ***
