Raid, The (2011)

Original title Serbuan maut

Director Gareth Evans

More than a bit of old-school ultra-violence is delivered in the director Gareth Huw Evans’s bone-crunching Indonesian action film. An élite group of law-enforcement officers raid a high-rise building run by a crime lord who lives on the top floor and has had video cameras installed everywhere. As the cops work their way up to the penthouse, they have to fight an army of his henchmen in brilliant, spectacular martial-arts fashion. The film may sound like a chopsocky, video-game-like lightweight, but there’s more going on here. The skillful fight choreography has an economy and an immediacy that allow the performers to inject their own personalities into the combat. Evans’s camera, as it slides along the floor and follows the pummelling bodies down corridors and up walls, seems free from the laws of gravity. The movie is a gory free-for-all, a horror film dressed up as an action film, and it’s as pure a shot of adrenaline as any Tarantino fan could wish for. - Bruce Diones / The New Yorker