Holy balls. That's all I had to say
after watching this movie. It's literally wall-to-wall violence. Each
scene stepping it up from the last. This film is being heralded as a
revolution in action movies. It currently holds a rating of 93% on
Rotten Tomatoes. While there is little to no character development,
and maybe only 10 minutes of dialogue over it's 100 minute runtime,
it is a great action movie. Hollywood has already started
pre-production on an American remake. The director/writer/fight
choreographer Gareth Evans was offered to direct the American
version, but he turned it down in favor of making the sequel to the
Indonesian original. If the sequel can top this, I will be impressed,
and I can only hope the American version doesn't mess anything up.
This Indonesian film appears to be set
in Jakarta, but could be in any major Indonesian city, we're never
given any real reference. Our main character is Rama, a rookie SWAT
Team member with a pregnant wife at home. His squad's assignment for
the day is to take down Tama, a ruthless gang leader who over the
years has established a “no go zone” for police. Tama rules from
the top floor of a 15 story tenement building where he lets his gang
members and junkies addicted to the drugs provided by the gang to
live rent free, thus creating a devoted army willing to defend the
building at any cost. The remainder of the movie is spent as Rama and
his team move from one floor to the next fighting gang members with
guns, knives, clubs, hands, and feet as well as a few other
improvised weapons. Most of the SWAT team is killed very quickly
leaving just a small handful to finish the job. It's very intense and
will leave you on the edge of your seat. The “Redemption” in the
title refers to Rama's brother who works for Tama as one of his top
guards. Rama encounters him and they eventually team up to take down
Tama.
The fight scenes in this movie are
truly epic and imaginative. Rama takes down one gang member after the
other in new and creative ways. One of the final fight scenes is so
long that the director cuts away from it to show an entire other
scene before returning to the fight to show the finish. Not that
these long fights become tedious. They remain very entertaining. In
terms of acting, it was somewhat difficult to determine whether or
not the actors were any good, not only because there is so little
dialogue, but what dialogue there is is in Indonesian. My only
complaint, besides the lack of character development (which I'm
willing to overlook in this case), is the set design. The sets where
the fight scenes took place in look so cheaply made that it is
honestly distracting. There were several occasions where instead of
looking like they were fighting in a rundown apartment, it looked
like they were fighting on stage at a high school production of a run
down apartment based musical. However, if you're looking for a top
notch action movie that isn't full of over the top explosions of
bloated, leathery actors, I highly recommend checking out The
Raid: Redemption.
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