The Raid: Redemption (2012) dir Gareth Evans

Soooo many machetes in this flick!

Around 2000 or so, I got super obsessed with all forms of Asian action cinema. I'd already seen the few Jackie Chan flicks that starting making it to US theaters from the mid-90s on and then I saw John Woo's "The Killer" and "Hard Boiled" and it was game fucking on. Didn't matter if it was martial arts, yakuzas, triads, assassins, samurais or ridiculous wire-work kung-fu. If it was made by someone from an Asian country, I was down to party. I've seen so many of these stupid movies that they've mostly all bled together in my mind as one massive action set piece with Jet Li cranekicking Chow Yun-Fat in slow motion while Jackie Chan speaks broken English and pulls some 3 Stooges shit on an unamused Andy Lau. What I'm trying to say here, friends and internet randos, is that I know my shit. Or at least I used to. I rarely watch these kinds of flicks anymore because most of them suck and I'm perfectly content with hanging on to the cream of the crop, such as the aforementioned Woo movies, "Fist of Legend," "Ong-Bak," the "Lone Wolf and Cub" series and so on and so forth.

That was a really long introduction to talk about a movie that I really don't have much to say about. It's totally buck wild, but it didn't really wow me like I had hoped. I will say it's the best Asian action movie I've seen since "Ong-Bak" and "The Protector," though.

"The Raid: Redemption" rode a critical tsunami of hype across the Pacific into American theaters (ed. note: really, dude?) and it mostly delivers on it's promise. Set in Indonesia, which is quite unique for these kinds of flicks, a SWAT team is dispatched to clean out a crime lord from his project apartment building, shit goes wrong of course, and utter mayhem ensues. I saw it with my friend Keith and we were both hoping for just a little something more overall, but you can't really argue with some of the major fight scenes in this flick. There's one towards in the end in particular that basically amounts to a final boss stage in a video game that felt like it went on for like 15 fucking minutes. Pure madness.

It's a pretty low budget affair, but oddly Welsh director Evans does throw in a few funky camera tricks and extended shots. They added the "Redemption" part of the title after the movie started getting hyped and sequels are now in the works. Hopefully they throw some big money at it and there are more cool extended shots in the sequel and other bells and whistles. I could see the next installment dwarfing the first if the budget starts getting equal with maker's ambition.