Synopsis: Summary: A Swat team arrives at a rundown apartment block with a mission to remove its owner, a notorious drug lord named Tama. The building has never been raided before, never been touched by police. Seen as a no go zone it has since become a 
sanctuary to killers, gangs, rapists and thieves seeking accommodation in the one place they know they cannot be touched. Making their move in the break of dawn the swat team work their way up the building under cover of silence. But when a chance encounter with a spotter blows their cover and with news of their assault traveling to Tama in his penthouse suite the building is locked down with all lights out and all exits blocked. Stranded on the 6th floor the swat team must fight their way through every floor and every room not just to complete their mission but to survive. (Merantau Films)
CRITICS CONSENSUS: CRAZY TO MISS
This film is about violence. All violence. Wall-to-wall violence. Against many of those walls, heads are pounded again and again into a pulpy mass. If I estimated the film has 10 minutes of dialogue, that would be generous.
I do wish that Evans were a better storyteller. When he isn’t turning mad-dog violence into visual rock & roll, The Raid shreds narrative coherence to ribbons.
The Raid is maniacal in its pacing and assault tactics. It’s also, absurdly, rated R. Fantastic. I love that a film this gory secured the same Motion Picture Association of America rating as “The King’s Speech.”
The mousetrap setup and tight fight spaces, the bad blood and cruel deaths – soon makes the movie grindingly monotonous, a blur of thudding body blows.
The special effects here are wiry martial artists grunting their way through fight after fight. It’s exhausting but exhilarating.
Gareth Evans’ Indonesian martial-arts throwback The Raid: Redemption has a look and feel that resembles the best of ’80s cult action movies: half John Carpenter, half John Woo.
Taking the genre to a higher level of intensity, the Welsh-born Evans continues what he started in previous Indonesia-set actioner “Merantau,” but this picture will seal his cult status.
There are moments when The Raid: Redemption doesn’t feel like an action movie so much as pure action itself, delivered in strong, undiluted doses and with the sort of creative one-upmanship capable of rejuvenating a stale, seen-it-all genre.
American action movies are almost entirely defined by cutaways, blaring music cues and grunts. The Raid: Redemption, a hyper-energetic Indonesian martial arts movie, delivers an effective rebuke to that meek norm. Bones break, blood flows and swift, excessively complicated fight choreography puts virtually everything released in North America since “The Bourne Ultimatum” to instant shame.
Unapologetically brutal and unencumbered by much plot, Raid is the year’s most turbo-charged film.
Lean, fast-moving, and filled with game-changing fight sequences that have a brutally beautiful (or beautifully brutal) quality, Gareth Evans’s Indonesian martial-arts film The Raid: Redemption lives up to its viral hype.
This mostly no-nonsense, floor-by-floor ass-kicking panorama is admirably humble.
Iko Uwais is not exactly a household name, but the Indonesian heartthrob appears to be well on his way with The Raid: Redemption, a clever, action-packed film that showcases his movie-star looks, low-key charisma and breathtaking martial arts skills.
Reviewed by: Alison Willmore
There’s a sliver of a plot to The Raid, but it’s really not worth going over — when the characters pause to talk, which is rare, it does tend to kill the film’s momentum.
Source : MetaCritic
Headlines From The CMP Newsroom
sanctuary to killers, gangs, rapists and thieves seeking accommodation in the one place they know they cannot be touched. Making their move in the break of dawn the swat team work their way up the building under cover of silence. But when a chance encounter with a spotter blows their cover and with news of their assault traveling to Tama in his penthouse suite the building is locked down with all lights out and all exits blocked. Stranded on the 6th floor the swat team must fight their way through every floor and every room not just to complete their mission but to survive. (Merantau Films)
