Rama, trapped in a scared couple’s apartment, hides an injured friend in a crawl space and tries to stay still and quiet while some guy stabs a wall with a machete. Rama, trapped in an apartment, makes a bomb out of a gas can and a refrigerator. The Raid isn’t a big-idea movie, but all the little ideas in it are amazing. He doesn’t want to make things easy for himself. In the movie’s best fight scene, he fights two different guys, calmly accepting the longer odds just because that’s the kind of sporting killer he is. Takes away the rush.” Mad Dog is an evil character, but he likes fighting so much, and he’s so good at it, that we, the audience, end up liking him anyway. And when he does fight, he always makes a point to put down his gun first: “I never really liked using these. Ruhian is Mad Dog, the boss’ main henchman, introduced by the police sergeant as “a maniac of feet and fists that would tear down walls for his boss.” The movie holds off on showing Ruhian fighting, almost like he’s the shark from Jaws. That distinction belongs to Yayan Ruhian, back from Merantau and now playing a much nastier character. As a screen fighter, Uwais is an all-time great, a human blur who seems reluctant to fight but who can also believably leg-sweep a guy and then shoot him in the head the second he falls.īut Uwais isn’t even the best screen fighter in the movie. And he’s even better at fighting those guys. He’s got an expressive face, and he can communicate the feeling of knowing that four dudes with machetes are about to run at you, that you’re going to have to kill all of them. Uwais wasn’t a trained actor, but the beauty of The Raid is that he doesn’t have to be. He’s young, innocent, fresh-faced, and you can tell that he wants to get out, to see his pregnant wife again. Uwais stars as Rama, the lead, and he’s perfect. So he rests his gun on the guy’s shoulder, goes to his desk, pulls out a hammer, and beats him to death. Pushers, gangs, killers-they all respect him like a god.” And we see that crime lord, in his habitat, methodically murdering four men, shooting all of them in the head while they’re kneeling on plastic on his office floor. A bunch of cops huddle in the back of a van, their shiny black helmets making them look weirdly like cockroaches, as their sergeant tells them about their target: “This man has become something of a legend in the underworld. The Raid is a movie that turns simplicity into a glorious virtue. And the faster, cheaper thing turned out to be the best thing he possibly could’ve made. Ennis wanted to make a grander, more expansive crime saga called Berandal, but he couldn’t get the budget together, so he had to make something faster and cheaper. The Raid, which turned out to be essentially the feature-length version of that one fight, was not the plan. And a scene like the bit in Merantau where Uwais and the older, smaller Yayan Ruhian slug it out in an elevator fit beautifully into that context. Screen fights were drawing on different disciplines and, thanks to MMA, the intermingling of those disciplines. Merantau came out at the end of a decade when the art of filming fight scenes was growing around the world, with different filmmakers from different countries putting their own spins on it. It’s all speed and inventiveness and brutal, brutal impact, and it works on screen. Nobody had really seen silat in an action movie before, but it’s a martial art that needed to be caught on film. The fights in Merantau were just staggering. Like those movies, it’s about a rural kid who comes to a big city and finds himself fighting a whole criminal network. He cast Uwais in Merantau, a very good 2009 movie that worked as a sort of Indonesian version of The Way Of The Dragon or Ong-Bak. He met Iko Uwais, a young martial artist who was working as a delivery driver and who looked good on camera. His wife’s family was from there, so he settled in. He packed up his family and moved to Jakarta. Eventually, he got hired to direct a documentary about pencak silat, a centuries-old Indonesian martial art built around the idea of full-body combat, of using whatever was available. He’d directed one unreleased independent movie, and he was working office jobs. In Wales, Evans’ movie career wasn’t really getting anywhere. The Raid was the brainchild of Gareth Evans, an action-movie fan and aspiring filmmaker from Wales.
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