The Raid takes action and fight cinema and strips it down to its purest, rawest and most essential elements. Complex back stories? Binned! Endless preamble building to big final 30 minutes finish? Binned! Anything but the most necessary dialogue? Binned!
What’s left is an awesome level jumping computer game of a movie. One where spectacular, violent and eye popping martial arts violence is the only rule and gore splattered spectacle wins out. We are given enough background in the opening scene to make us care for the protagonist and then bang… He and his fellow cops are trying to capture floors as they ascend a tower packed full of tweaking drug crazies with machetes and no proper regard for personal safety. The resulting bloodbath is quite literally like nothing you’ve ever seen. This film is the bullet ballets of classic Hong Kong action writ large and taken beyond logic into some inspired realm of on screen ultraviolence, the like of which is going to be near impossible to top.
The Raid is a lean, vicious animal, stripped of any fat, honed to perfection and utterly efficient. If this film doesn’t blow you through the living room wall into next doors house, there’s something very, very wrong
Ok, bold title and a few caveats. The plot is SWAT team tries to get a drug baron in a block of flats…and that’s it for plot and locations. The dialogue is in Indonesian so the translation may lose some nuance (but I doubt it) and overall it’s every action cliche rolled into one script.
So why the title and 5 stars? Because everything is executed perfectly. The sweaty tension raising intro, the bombastic gunfights and most of all the incredibly brutal, fast and efficient martial arts.
I saw this on a Wednesday evening in a half full cinema- and yet there were spontaneous rounds of applause and cries of “oh god!” as you saw audacious action scene after visceral fistfight. It is a constant thrill with enough “plot” to allow you to recover before the next shot of adrenaline cinema kicks in. It reminds Hollywood it’s not about money or how much blows up but how it blows up and two men fighting in a kitchen can be more exciting than watching a city being trashed by giant robots.
A must see for any fan of action movies.
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I have to be honest, I’m not all that interested in the action movie genre. A lot of the time I find such movies try too hard to have a gripping story and deep characters, and instead just come off as silly and a little but cheesy. But The Raid is a totally different beast. Instead of wasting time crafting some deep, meaniful storyline, The Raid does what most other action movies wish they could do: carry a film on it’s action scenes alone, without having to rely on a deep narrative. That’s not to say the Raid doesn’t have a story. It does, although it’s so basic as to almost be non existent. The story is basically there to gel the action scenes together. And what action scenes they are. The Raid is the first film I’ve ever seen which mixes guns and fist fights to such amazing effect. One minute everyone is involved in a big shoot out, the next their using their fists or any melee weapon they can find to survive the situation. Trust me, there are some fight scenes in this film that are nothing short of astonishing and as long as your not expecting much in the way of the storyline, you should love every minute of it.
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Fight Film Stripped Down,
The Raid takes action and fight cinema and strips it down to its purest, rawest and most essential elements. Complex back stories? Binned! Endless preamble building to big final 30 minutes finish? Binned! Anything but the most necessary dialogue? Binned!
What’s left is an awesome level jumping computer game of a movie. One where spectacular, violent and eye popping martial arts violence is the only rule and gore splattered spectacle wins out. We are given enough background in the opening scene to make us care for the protagonist and then bang… He and his fellow cops are trying to capture floors as they ascend a tower packed full of tweaking drug crazies with machetes and no proper regard for personal safety. The resulting bloodbath is quite literally like nothing you’ve ever seen. This film is the bullet ballets of classic Hong Kong action writ large and taken beyond logic into some inspired realm of on screen ultraviolence, the like of which is going to be near impossible to top.
The Raid is a lean, vicious animal, stripped of any fat, honed to perfection and utterly efficient. If this film doesn’t blow you through the living room wall into next doors house, there’s something very, very wrong
The Raid [Blu-ray]
The Raid [DVD]
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|Best action film in 20 years,
Ok, bold title and a few caveats. The plot is SWAT team tries to get a drug baron in a block of flats…and that’s it for plot and locations. The dialogue is in Indonesian so the translation may lose some nuance (but I doubt it) and overall it’s every action cliche rolled into one script.
So why the title and 5 stars? Because everything is executed perfectly. The sweaty tension raising intro, the bombastic gunfights and most of all the incredibly brutal, fast and efficient martial arts.
I saw this on a Wednesday evening in a half full cinema- and yet there were spontaneous rounds of applause and cries of “oh god!” as you saw audacious action scene after visceral fistfight. It is a constant thrill with enough “plot” to allow you to recover before the next shot of adrenaline cinema kicks in. It reminds Hollywood it’s not about money or how much blows up but how it blows up and two men fighting in a kitchen can be more exciting than watching a city being trashed by giant robots.
A must see for any fan of action movies.
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|Not much in the story department, but the incredible action scenes more than make up for it.,
I have to be honest, I’m not all that interested in the action movie genre. A lot of the time I find such movies try too hard to have a gripping story and deep characters, and instead just come off as silly and a little but cheesy.
But The Raid is a totally different beast. Instead of wasting time crafting some deep, meaniful storyline, The Raid does what most other action movies wish they could do: carry a film on it’s action scenes alone, without having to rely on a deep narrative.
That’s not to say the Raid doesn’t have a story. It does, although it’s so basic as to almost be non existent. The story is basically there to gel the action scenes together. And what action scenes they are. The Raid is the first film I’ve ever seen which mixes guns and fist fights to such amazing effect. One minute everyone is involved in a big shoot out, the next their using their fists or any melee weapon they can find to survive the situation. Trust me, there are some fight scenes in this film that are nothing short of astonishing and as long as your not expecting much in the way of the storyline, you should love every minute of it.
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