The Raid:Redemption

Dear readers, I sincerely apologize for the empty blog space for the last two weeks. I wish I could claim I was on a highly secretive mission for the federal government which involves killing villains and defusing nuclear bombs but sadly it was just due to procrastination.

Procrastination is the biggest villain of all times. It just sneaks up on you and before you know it, you are six feet deep and it’s still swinging punches at you. Anyway, as the star (actor) of this blog, I am happy to announce the defeat of procrastination, well at least for now.

I was discussing the movie, The Man from Nowhere with my friend Bariyu and the discussion digressed to oriental movies and he mentioned this movie-The Raid: The Redemption. He said he heard the movie was bad ass and that it got a lot of positive reviews .I asked if it was a recent movie and he said 2011 or so.

I was surfing the web and came across this list –the best 25 action movies for the last two decades and lo and behold was the movie, The Raid: The Redemption. Now my curiosity was well and truly tickled. This list had all-time greats like Terminator 2, The Rock, Die Hard 1, etc.

I got the DVD and it was worth every kobo.

Plot line as the name suggests, is about the raid of a multi storied building occupied by all sorts of criminals but ruled by a brutal kingpin who had the whole building under CCTV surveillance. The raid was conducted by a small police team led by a corrupt officer.

The police team had their communications system blocked once inside the building and with the kingpin offering a reward for the heads of each of the police officers, what initially was a raid on the building turned to a fight for survival.

The fight scenes were fantastic, images that stuck to my head were a man kicked off the balcony and falling onto a ledge and his body cracking into two, the action was from floor to floor and the sound editing was superb.

There was a scene with continuous shooting and then the sound of gunfire fades to an eerie silence that you get when your eardrums have been assaulted with continuous noise and it feels as you have been slapped on both ears. Brilliant!

Oriental movies made a definite statement with this movie. Dredd, a Hollywood movie that came out the following year starring Karl Urban had almost the same plot line. The Raid made a statement heard and copied in Hollywood.