The Raid: Redemption--Review

Best Action Movie since…all time?

          Back in 1995 I was up watching late night cable, and there was a movie coming on I had read a lot about, some called it the greatest action movie of all time.  It was John Woo’s “The Killer” and I will admit up until that point I had seen three Lethal Weapons, three Die Hards, almost every Bruce Lee movie and several Kung-Fu flicks.  But this was indeed the greatest piece of action cinema I had ever seen.  That charged up feeling it gave me at three o’clock in the morning that kept me up for hours later was incredible.  Since then the last time I got the slightest of a charge from an action movie was five years later in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”.   It was action on an epic scale compared to John Woo’s cops vs. killers.  Then came Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Tony Jaa.  All of them great in the realm of action cinema.

This new film by Gareth Evans “The Raid: Redemption” gave me that long lost feeling from 1995, a charged up piece of action cinema that I not just witnessed, but experienced.  The little of plot that there is pretty much feels like a cliché for this type of film,  a rookie cop complete with pregnant wife and dark secret goes on a mission with his swat team to take down a gang lord in an apartment complex.  Things escalate quickly as they become trapped in the building and the crime lord announces to the tenants over the intercom that whoever kills the uninvited cops will have protection for life.  This starts a barrage of action set piece after action set piece of brutal carnage between the cops vs. killers, drug dealers, and gang members all equipped with guns, machetes, and kung-fu.  There is kind of a story with almost zero character development, but it is only there so you can rest between the action scenes, otherwise you would get a heart attack.

It’s a foreign film, which means it will not be in theaters long, so check it out as soon as you can.  I also recommend you don’t watch the trailer, it does show some of the scenes of the film, but the best stuff is not in the trailer. There are things in this film that we all may have seen before, but I appreciated the director’s respect for his target audience.  We don’t always need something new, sometimes we just want what we’ve seen before done well.  If you love action movies, they truly do not come better than this.

--Robert L. Castillo