- UK release: May 2012
- Director: Gareth Evans · Writer: Gareth Evans
- Studio / distributor: PT Merantau Films; XYZ Films; Momentum Pictures (UK)
- Genre: Martial-arts action thriller / siege film · Runtime: 101 minutes (BBFC 18)
- Main cast: Iko Uwais (Merantau) as Rama; Joe Taslim as Jaka; Donny Alamsyah as Andi; Yayan Ruhian (Merantau) as Mad Dog; Ray Sahetapy as Tama
- IMDb: 7.6 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 87% critics / 87% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Every few years a film comes along that resets what an action sequence is allowed to look like, and the people who care about this sort of thing start pressing it on everyone they know. The Raid is that film for 2012. It comes from an unlikely direction: a Welsh director, Gareth Evans, working in Indonesia with a stuntman-turned-star and the local martial art of pencak silat, on a budget that would not cover the catering on a Hollywood blockbuster. What he has made is leaner and nastier and more inventive than almost anything the studios have managed in a decade, and it does it with a premise you could write on the back of a ticket stub.
The setup
A heavily armed police squad rolls up before dawn at a grim fifteen-storey tower block on the edge of Jakarta. The building belongs to Tama (Ray Sahetapy), a crime lord who rents its floors to every kind of dealer and killer, and who has made the place a fortress that the law has never dared enter. The plan is to go in quietly, climb to the top, and take him. It survives about as long as plans usually do. Once Tama spots the intruders on his cameras and offers permanent free tenancy to whoever brings him their bodies, the squad is trapped, outnumbered and cut off, and a young rookie named Rama (Iko Uwais) has to fight his way down through every floor between him and the street. There is a little more to it than that, a thread of family loyalty that gives the back half some weight, but the engine of the thing is gloriously simple: one building, one way out, and a small army in between.
The cast
This is not a film that asks for great acting, and it is wise enough to know it. Iko Uwais carries it on physical authority alone. He is a genuine silat practitioner rather than an actor learning moves for the camera, and it shows in every exchange: the speed is real, the balance is real, and there is a controlled economy to him that makes the violence read as skill rather than chaos. Joe Taslim brings a tired, watchful competence to Jaka, the sergeant who can see how badly the night is going. The performance that walks off with the picture, though, is Yayan Ruhian as Mad Dog, a small, unhurried enforcer who prefers his fists to a gun because killing up close is the part he enjoys. He is one of the most quietly frightening figures the genre has produced, and Ruhian, who also choreographed the fights with Uwais, has built the role from the inside out.
The craft
What sets The Raid apart is clarity. Evans, who edited the film himself, has nothing but contempt for the shaky, over-cut style that has let lesser action films fake their fights for years. The camera holds, the geography stays legible, and you can follow every blow, block and counter as the choreography escalates from gun battles into close-quarters brawling and finally into long unbroken passages of hand-to-hand combat. The fights are punishing and bloody, staged in narrow corridors and bare rooms that turn the architecture itself into a weapon. The pulsing electronic score, reworked for international release by Mike Shinoda and Joseph Trapanese, keeps the pressure relentless without ever drowning the impact of the hits. At a tight 101 minutes the film barely lets you breathe, and it never once feels padded.
How it stacks up
The obvious ancestor is Die Hard: one building, one outmatched man, a slow vertical war. But where Die Hard is a thriller with action in it, The Raid is almost pure motion, closer in spirit to the balletic gunplay of John Woo’s Hard Boiled or the breathless physicality of Tony Jaa in Ong-Bak. It shares with all of those an old-fashioned belief that a stunt performed for real, in frame, beats anything you can assemble in a cutting room. What it gives up is the wit and the heart that the very best of the form smuggle in around the carnage. The story here is a delivery system, and there is a stretch in the middle where the lack of character starts to tell. But as a demonstration of what bodies can do on screen, it has very few rivals.
Critics versus the rest of us
The critics and the crowd are, unusually, in complete agreement: 87% on both counts at Rotten Tomatoes, with reviewers calling it a ferocious, stripped-down instant classic and audiences turning it into the word-of-mouth hit of the festival circuit. The only real reservation anyone raises is the slimness of the plot, and that is a fair note rather than a damning one. My own reaction lines up closely with the consensus. I tend to prize world-building, atmosphere and ideas over spectacle, and on those terms this is not the kind of film I usually rate highest. It earns its place by being so completely the thing it sets out to be.
Verdict
The Raid knows exactly what it is and refuses to be anything else, and that single-mindedness is its strength and its limit. The action is the best I have seen in years, clear, brutal and endlessly inventive, and it is the rare action film I would happily watch again purely for the craft of the fights. It loses a point for the thinness underneath, the absence of much to hold on to once the adrenaline drains off. But on sheer kinetic invention it is close to untouchable, and it announces Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais as names to follow. 8⁄10.
Availability: On release in UK cinemas now, courtesy of Momentum Pictures. See it with a crowd if you can.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Evans and Uwais reunited two years later for The Raid 2 (2014), a longer, more ambitious gangland epic that expanded the world the first film barely had time for and is, for some, the stronger picture. The original has settled into its reputation as a modern action landmark, regularly cited as a turning point for legible, real-stunt fight cinema, and its influence is visible across the genre, not least in the John Wick films, one of which gives Yayan Ruhian a memorable cameo. It is widely available on disc and digital, and streams across various platforms depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 18 by the BBFC for frequent strong bloody violence and gore. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There is frequent strong bloody violence and gore as guns, axes and machetes are used regularly in the many fast paced fight scenes. Strong scenes include sight of a man being axed in the chest, and a man being shot in the head in close up. In another scene, a broken light tube is used to stab a man in the neck, and it is dragged across his throat to kill him.
Language: There is infrequent use of very strong language (‘c**t’), and use of strong language (‘f**k’).
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
