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Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

How sad is this?

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Horrible fight scenes, horrible pacing, horrible story, horrible camera work, horrible dubbing, horrible propaganda. I think they spent more on bots giving this movie a good review than they did on the actual movie itself.

I am usually not into action films unless they are really good. This one is totally unique and is now one my #1 action favorite. This movie is like nothing made before. And is so awesome. Go see it.

Double bill time, Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans has made a big splash with his action one-two punch which puts the Indonesian martial art "Pencak Silat" on a bigger map. Swimming against the tide of an inexorably digitized world, since the noughties, action movies have been experiencing a somewhat fundamentalistic revolution ushered in by ONG-BAK: THE THAI WARRIOR (2003), where a more tactile, point-blank and lethal combat style greatly relying on the performers' physical prowess sounding the death knell for a plethora of CGI-heavy schlock, and Gareth Evans takes the revolution further down that road, at any time of the day, it is more than welcomingBlanketed in its slate blue hue, THE RAID: REDEMPTION has a setting like a single-location entrapment horror flick, a catastrophic heavy blow incurs to a team of elite squad when they raid inside a tenement tower block owned by the crime lord Tama Riyado (Sahetapy) in Jakarta's slums, it turns out to be a set-up as a corollary of corruption among police top-brass. Assailed by not zombies but practically zombie-looking inhabitants (bedraggled drug addicts mostly) and a cohort of Tama's henchmen, they might find some painful irony (if they are still breathing) from recollecting the paradoxical pep talk of Sergeant Jaka (Taslim), who is leading the raid, paraphrasing here: it is a highly dangerous mission, but I don't want to see any of those seats empty when we return. The one who is bestowed with a protagonist nimbus is Rama (Uwais), a tyro in the forces and has an ax to grind in the game, when all the ammo is expended, his killer martial art skill starts to tip the scale in the bloodshed. Since its no-account story-line seldom fluctuates with plot development (barring a fraternal reunion), and although many tropes of suspense routinely deployed to the hilt, it is the action pieces taking our breath away, the go-for-the-jugular (joints, limbs, and other more cardinal parts) pragmatism and Evans' lenience on blood and guts, skewered together one set piece after another, our rapt attention becomes a given, and the brutal aesthetics reaches its crescendo in the close-range combat between Rama, his brother Andi (Alamsyah) and Tama's top muscle, a disheveled Mad Dog (Ruhian, who is a martial art virtuoso and the fight choreographer for both movies, also plays a completely different character in the sequel). After REDEMPTION successfully testing the water, THE RAID 2: BERANDAL (which means thug in Indonesian) is expectedly souped up by a significantly boosted budget and an ampler length (150 minutes, 50 minutes longer than the first installment). Mapping out an ambitious gangster turf war saga, Evans' script swiftly sends Rama to the joint to befriend Uco (Putra), the son of Bangun (Pakusadewo), one of the two kingpins of Jakarta's underworld, where a muddy mêlèe during a downpour set alight the first frisson of excitement (it is a virtue Evans doesn't overuse the worn- out slo-mo shtick, after THE MATRIX 1999 and its countless emulators, enough is enough). In fact, the resultant story veers more towards Uco's ill-conceived subversion, and Putra, not quite a martial artist himself but commendably takes up the gauntlet as a pompous gilded youth, too thrusting and wanting both wits and patience to mellow into a rightful heir of his father's cosmic empire, particularly when there is nothing to imperil his standing, what is the fuss anyway? Maybe like in every patriarch's incubus, he is just a bad seed and driven at lengths to carry out a patricidal sin, Putra's performance is vehement, visceral and transforms Uco as the film's heart of matter, a grab bag of what is wrong with today's youngsters. In the action section, on the one hand, Evans continues choreographing striking fighting sequences of Pencak Silat, and playing up the possibility of orchestration within a two-by-four space (a prison bathroom, or inside a barreling car); on the other hand, in tandem with an enclosed fistfight, he also cuts his teeth into a sterling car chase set piece with an ace in his sleeve, and what an adrenaline rush it spurs! Although it would be remiss of me to not mention a congenital hiccup rather common in action fares, those conspicuous ready-to-take-the-hit poses or caesuras, mostly from foot soldiers during their meager screen-time, it immediately dispels the "realness" of all the onerously rehearsed teamwork. The most pyrotechnic eye-catcher is indubitably the final showdown between Rama and the karambit-knives-wielding killer, credited as the Assassin (Rahman), which makes Very Tri Yulisman's Baseball Bat Man and Julie Estelle's Hammer Girl quite bathetic in their gore-fest, not to mention the boss who prefers heavy weaponry but is inept enough to toss it to the wrong one when the crunch comes.Both movies are cracking genre pieces made with labor of love, devotion and dexterity, and Evans' directorial flair takes a crucial peg up under the sequel's grander scale, blissfully, one can see the potential in a filmmaker which can unbridle the genre parameters.

The Raid is a simple story about a SWAT team that has been sent out to take down the infamous criminal Toma, who's the owner of an apartment building filled with thugs. After the team has arrived and got into this tenement, they become trapped inside the building and escaping the building seems to be harder than it was to get into…This film was directed very well by Gareth Evans who created a good looking movie, well, good not necessarily good-looking color wise as they made the color grading look very dirty to capture the dark atmosphere. The framing though was really good. This is an action film as you could've guessed, so it's bound to have fighting sequences, and since this movie is praised specifically for that part, I was expecting quite a lot of this. And, did it surpass my expectations? Absolutely. They were amazing. This movie is worth watching just for the action scenes, something you don't hear a lot these days. The director obviously loved the martial arts used in the film and he translates that very well to the big screen. Gareth Evans, the director, was also keen on his use of edits as he at times didn't cut away from the action for a couple of seconds and created these amazing fighting sequences that had a fantastic flow to them. He was also able to keep these scenes easy to follow, also something not a lot of movies do right these days, by having the camera stay steady and don't cut every second. It's been a while since I've seen a movie where the stunt work was as good as it is in this one and The Raid deserves all the credit it's getting for having the best fight choreography. The whole film was practically one big action scene with some intermissions, so it would've been a shame if the action scenes were not as good as they are now. There were also these dumb moments (the fridge scene), but the film knows that those scenes are silly and they don't try to take themselves serious, which is always a good thing for a movie to do. The make-up and set design were all pretty good considering the low budget they had the work with. But those intermissions brought some problems to the table. The film has a pretty fast pace throughout the film, but stops abruptly every time there's an intermission in which they try to develop characters. I don't mind that they develop their characters, since I like to see a movie with well-rounded characters that feel like real people, but the problem is that the writing in those scenes just wasn't that good. They were mostly clichéd, like the opening sequence in which they want us to relate to the main character, but ultimately fail at doing that, because they use a technique that has been done a million times before, which is a real shame. Throughout the movie thought there are some actions he does whereby we get to know him for a bit, it's just those moments when the movie abruptly comes to a stop where the problem lays.The acting was pretty good though and they set up the villain nicely with the use of only one scene. His acting was really good and he came over really menacing. Iko Uwais, who played the protagonist, his acting was really good and because of this he made his character feel more real than the writing itself did. I did like that the characters each had their vulnerabilities to them and that they affected how they fought and not that they were able to shake it off.As you're able to see of that little description of the story it seems to be fairly simple. Not overly complicated, just straightforward and I liked that. A lot of B-movies reach for the over convoluted story to cover up the fact that theirs is simple or just dumb. In The Raid that's not the case. There's no complicated story needed and it's also not trying to cover up the fact that it's straightforward. The film knows what it is and it embraces that really hard. But that all doesn't mean that the story isn't clever. It's actually quite clever in the way the story is constructed. It's constructed like an old 80's or 90's video game, namely that you have to build your way up to the final boss-level while each level starts to get harder and harder. In the end this was an amazing action film, but just a decent film overall. The acting was good, but the characters were lacking, which obviously lays within the screenplay, which wasn't the greatest. The action scenes however were shot amazingly and the so was the fight choreography. That's why this film gets a 7.5/10.