The Raid: Redemption (2012)

★½
The Raid: Redemption is a con job. It’s like the friend who buys a new car and takes you for a spin to show it off only to have it break down on the freeway. The story involves an elite police squad in Jakarta that descends on a 15-story apartment building to arrest a drug lord, all the while contending with his henchmen the whole way up. It’s an interesting concept, but the movie emphasizes its fight scenes so much that it capsizes. The story just wasn’t developed well enough to provide any compelling reason for this risky mission. As a result, there are lots of fights, lots of deaths, lots of bullets, but it adds up to nothing.

Lieutenant Wahyu (Pierre Gruno) leads the 20-man squad into a crime-infested neighborhood to take out Tama (Ray Sahetapy), who sits on the 15th floor and has cameras everywhere and dozens of goons to protect him. Among the team is rookie cop Rama (Iko Uwais), also an expectant father. The mission is clear enough: fight to the top floor and arrest Tama. It is upon this simple premise that the entire movie is built, with a few twists inserted to shake things up. The mission goes smoothly up to the 5th floor, but after that the chaos begins. Tama issues a bounty on the cops, so that not only are Tama’s minions a threat, but potentially the residents too.

The movie is a series of fights all the way to the top floor. The bodies of cops and Tama’s men litter the hallways. There are stabbings, beatings, bullet holes and broken backs. Director Gareth Evans filmed these scenes at a frantic pace and backed them with a thumping soundtrack. There is the occasional break thrown in for the characters to discuss the situation, and it is here that the movie goes wrong. The cops arrived at this location under the pretense of capturing Tama, but they are actually the victims of a double cross. Wahyu knows more about it and thinks he’s in control, until he is on the receiving end of another double cross, making him the target of corrupt superiors.

Once we sift through the double crosses, we see that Wahyu himself was the target, not Tama. Gareth would have us believe that the best way to take out Wahyu was to send him into a heavily armed building along with 20 highly skilled cops and sacrifice all of them. The details of Wahyu’s infraction against his superiors is never mentioned. If he was a nuisance that needed to be eliminated, then getting a patsy to assassinate him at his house would have accomplished the same thing. Instead, we get all this sound and fury, ending with Rama emerging as one of the few survivors, holding evidence to bust his chain of command. This is a perfect example of what the late Roger Ebert called the Idiot Plot.

The Road Warrior also had a thin plot that served to propel the action, which included several technically splendid chase scenes. That movie clearly defined its characters’ motives, so that we could understand their situation and what drove them to do the things they did. In The Raid: Redemption, we get a thin plot that collapses under only the slightest of scrutiny. That’s a shame. I have a soft spot for movies like this. I grew up watching Jean-Claude Van Damme’s karate flicks, and I enjoyed Tony Jaa’s output from Thailand. The Raid doesn’t come close to their best.

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