If all-out action is everything that's on your list for tonight, then sir, The Raid: Redemption should get you high perfectly. The movie doesn't want to build the most genius narrative or develop the best-colored character there is. Set up's real plain: local Jakarta policemen infiltrates a high rise building, inside is all kinds of gung-hos and at the top is a crime lord and two of his best men.
In the middle of the mission is rookie cop Rama (Iko Uwais). Him and his unsuspecting team is held stunned when thugs suddenly go after their heads, leaving more than half of the team wiped out from first open fire. The remainder of the team, including Rama, tries to ascend from the hellacious floors of the apartment block and accomplish the mission once and for all.
Welsh-director Gareth Evans expertly stages the action sequences, choreographed to perfection. There's clarity in the fight scenes uncommon to many recent that tightly relies on shaky-cam. Tons of panning and tilting are delightful in the eyes, keeping the energetic and violent never waning. Evans's execution is focal to action enough, perhaps too much, as action is no wonders the main concern here, and to tell, it's magnificent. Kind of a rare find, The Raid: Redemption, while arguably violent and most certainly inventive, lacks the beneath-your-skin kind of suspense. Bone-crunching and fidgeting kill scenes however are fair enough for compensation.
Uwais's relatively charismatic soul defies his grayish, if not solidly black-and-white character, whose real ordeal tangles with his own visceral fears. Unbeknownst to his co-policemen, his brother was one of the leader thug's left-hand man. Uwais and Andi (Rama's brother played by Donny Alamsyah) and Mad Dog's (Yayan Ruhian) final confrontation is a frenzy of action pulp. Ruhian is an epitomic personification of an animated physique, but soulless, with no real intentions than causing havoc in the most brutal way imaginable.
See, action's the real spice in Redemption. Without it, we're served with a bland film of one hour and a half. There's no plausible thing outside action and pacing here, monochromatic character-building and frizzling flat narrative intricacy. I realized how many times I've mentioned the word: action, can't be very few, because the action in here is that good. I'll mention the word one last time: if the action, no frills, in The Raid: Redemption is consolation, then boy, how fine am I if you called me loser. A
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