Wow, they do actually make ’em like that anymore. In the same month that a certain terminally pedestrian science-fiction blockbuster continues to mop up at the box office, The Raid: Redemption has arrived to tell us that some people still know how to shoot an action movie. There’s a large and loyal audience for the kind of brutal grindhouse experience that director Gareth Evans serves up with his Indonesian-made martial-arts flick, and the film comes with an almighty buzz. Screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival and South by Southwest have been explosive affairs.

“It’s just been incredible,” Evans tells the Georgia Straight during a phone call from Toronto, “to be able to share this film and realize that there are all kinds of like-minded people out there and, you know, that I don’t need therapy. That’s been the best thing so far.” Even though Evans adds that he takes the unanimous acclaim as “confirmation that it’s not too violent a movie”, rest assured that The Raid is—my fucking God—an outrageously violent movie. But Evans shoots his 90 minutes of escalating machine-gun-, machete-, and fisticuffs-laden mayhem in the balletic manner of Police Story–era Jackie Chan or Hard Boiled–vintage John Woo, with choreography on both sides of the camera that takes your breath away.

Wedded to all this is the Welsh writer-director’s appreciation for the craftsmanlike qualities of past Hollywood masters of exploitation cinema. “John Carpenter and Walter Hill—those classics of the ’70s, ’80s, you know?—films made on a budget but made with absolute fingernail-chewing tension and suspense,” he says. “Those are the films I love the most, so we put a few homage shots in there.” An early reference to the character of D. J. in Hill’s The Warriors is one wink at the audience, and the film’s stupidly brilliant premise—a SWAT team is dispatched to invade a 15-storey concrete tower presided over by a seemingly untouchable mob boss—is genetically related to Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape From New York (as is the taut, minimal synth score by Mike
Shinoda and Joe Trapanese).

Inside the building—surprise!—shit goes very seriously south. The rest of the film concerns the team’s efforts (what’s left of it) to get out, aided in no way by Ray Sahetapy’s weirdly dissolute crime boss, Tama, who promises a lifetime of free rent to any of the block’s resident berserkers who can bag a cop. Evans adds just enough plot to keep things sharp—a lost brother here, a corrupt senior officer there—and then gives us a star in the making in the shape of Iko Uwais as Rama, an arse-kicking rookie with a pregnant wife waiting at home. Uwais utterly nails the all-important Bruce Lee equation: he’s magnetic, sexy, and an awesome practitioner, in this case, of a super-fluid Indonesian fighting style called Silat.

The Raid otherwise dignifies itself with memorable characters, like the terrifying but soulful henchman Mad Dog, who elects at one point to put down his gun and fight Rama hand to hand “because pulling a trigger is like ordering takeout”. There are also a fistful of scenes that’ll have you wondering how many stuntmen made it off the set alive. In one worryingly real-looking set piece, a guy is tossed over a balcony and meets what Evans calls “the most horrible, grim, sudden end to a fall you’ve ever seen”. Clearly, the man has a feel for the kind of kinetic yet visually articulate filmmaking that’s becoming ever more of a lost art. Even as he’s playing down his own talents behind the camera, Evans eagerly acknowledges his fascination with the history of poetically lensed, existentially weighted celluloid carnage that stretches from Sam Peckinpah to the “late ’80s to early ’90s Hong Kong golden age of action cinema”.

“These films have such clear action sequences; there’s nothing flashy about it, and that suits me down to the ground, because I’m not a flashy director,” he says. “I’m not someone who can kind of edit a sequence where we do a lot of showboating. My understanding of [video-editing software] Final Cut Pro is pretty much straight cuts, and that’s it. As a result of that, in order to get everything looking good, it has to be in camera. You have to see the detail in camera or, for me, it just doesn’t work. It was never really an option. It wasn’t like I felt like I was doing something revolutionary with action. Just, purely, I want to see it because I love it, and that was it.”

All modesty aside, there might be something significant to Evans’s approach, which is simple only in that he intuitively knows where, when, and how to move his camera for maximum impact. Behind that is a similarly uncomplicated love for the genre he’s working in. Although a movie like Hobo With a Shotgun is busy commenting on and celebrating its exploitation roots, in Evans’s film that kind of fancy postmodern footwork or ironic distance is—all “homage shots” aside—just so much collateral damage.

“A lot of people commented about The Raid playing like a grindhouse film, and I think the reason why people felt like that is because we played it straight,” Evans suggests. “We didn’t play it for shits and giggles. We didn’t want to go for the nod and the wink. We’re just making the film feel like it’s genuine to itself, and that was our approach from the very beginning.”

As Quentin Tarantino might say, “Motherfuckin’ mission accomplished.”

Georgia Straight, April 2012