The Raid: Redemption Movie Review

Posted by Charmaine Blake on Mar 28th, 2012 in Action Adventure, New Releases | 0 comments

The Raid: Redemption Movie Review

The Raid: Redemption is an action film starring Iko Uwais, Ananda George and Ray Sahetapy. Directed by Gareth Evans, The Raid: Redemption is a story about a rookie officer Rama (Uwais), a member of the special elite force who must pick up the duty of their fallen leader to lead the team and finish their mission. The Raid: Redemption was shown in theaters last March 23rd 2012. Let’s take a look at a movie review provided by Liam Lacey:

The Raid: Redemption, A High Octane Film Directed By Gareth Evans

“After too many bloated Hollywood spectacles, the joltingly energetic The Raid: Redemption feels like an action film distilled to its essence. Plot, characterization and dialogue are merely the frame here for the real goods, an immersion into the Indonesian martial arts form known assilat. Welsh-born writer-director Gareth Huw Evans’s movie, which won the Midnight Madness People’s Choice Award at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, is one long adrenaline rush.

The film is a battle in a box, likeSuper Mario meets Saving Private Ryan in a story of an elite Indonesian police SWAT team that infiltrates a fiendishly well-defended criminal tenement hideout. Though the sequences of battlers knifing, shooting, strangling and banging out drum rolls on each other’s skulls are alarmingly believable (necks snap, blood flows), The Raid’sredemption is its cinematicprowess. The camerawork is acrobatic, the editing (also by Evans) is precise and propulsive, and the stunt choreography is peerless. And all for a puny budget of about $1.1-million.

The story consists of occasional short scenes of people talking before fighting again. There’s a good cop named Rama and a bad criminal named Tama, and many other cops and bad guys and a maze of stairwells and corridors where the fighting takes place. Rama (Iko Uwais) is a rookie cop who kisses his pregnant wife goodbye and heads off on a pre-dawn raid to overthrow a criminal kingpin, Tama (Ray Sahetapy), who lives in the 15th-floor penthouse atop the tenement. How mean is Tama? We first meet him as he shoots a row of bound victims; when he runs out of bullets, he finishes the last one with a hammer.

Moments later, Tama is alerted that the police have arrived en masse, and he sits watching their entrance on close-circuit television. By the time they’ve reached the sixth floor, it becomes obvious to them they have entered a trap, set up as a payback scheme between corrupt politicians and gangsters. The criminals have the building wired with close-circuit television monitors and microphones, as well as child look-outs stationed on each floor.

As the police walk in, their ranks are decimated by a barrage of automatic weapons fire. The few survivors, who hide in corners or apartments, have only two options: Fight their way back down and escape, or fight their way to the top and take out the boss. Furious hand-to-hand fighting scenes are briefly relieved by interludes of desperate tension. At one point, Rama and a wounded colleague hide in a closet in a couple’s apartment. A gangster shoves in a machete close enough to slice Rama’s cheek, but he suppresses his cry and he barely manages to wipe the tell-tale blood off the blade before it’s withdrawn again.”

The rest of the article can be read at Globe And Mail

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Charmaine Blake loves movies, musical theater listening to music and taking pictures of anything that she finds interesting. She is a voracious reader and writer, and enjoys her time writing for New Movie Launches. Charmaine loves spending time with her pets and currently has a Siberian Husky, a toy poodle and a cat.