5/16/2023 0 Comments Gareth evans the raid![]() Their names speak for themselves and the bone-crunching violence they commit with their chosen weapons. In The Raid 2 the mastermind behind the convoluted plot has two assassins in his employ called Baseball Bat Man and Hammer Girl. His chief hitman is a violent psycho called Mad Dog. The drug lord running the show on the top floor runs out of bullets when executing people at the start of the film and instead of reloading beats the last man to death with a hammer. ![]() On every floor wait criminals waiting to kill them at the behest of the apartment block’s owner. In The Raid a squad of police men must fight their way up through an apartment block. Uwais may play a good guy in three out of the four films mentioned above but ‘good guy’ is a loose term in the world of Indonesian action movies. Even in the recent American disappointment Mile 22 Iko Uwais shone through Peter Berg’s shoddy direction. The star of Evans’ The Raid and The Raid 2 as well as Timo Tjahjanto’s Headshot and The Night Comes For Us Uwais radiates athleticism and charisma. The most famous martial artist to practice it is Iko Uwais. Something it’s practitioners have no problem doing in the films they star in. ![]() Pencak Silat is a martial art seemingly designed to kill or cripple your opponent as fast as possible. Comparing it to the kung-fu comedy of Jackie Chan or the mesmerising Muay Thai practiced by Tony Jaa is like comparing Queensbury Rules to bareknuckle boxing. Pencak Silat is practiced throughout South-East Asia but is most famous on the Indonesian archipelago. Directed by Welshman Gareth Evans The Raid put Indonesia on the map as the home for a newer, more brutal style of martial arts movie. Men are put through walls, thrown over balconies and left in broken, bleeding piles by the film’s heroes and villains. The Raid is really more stunt show than film but that only heightens the impact. To understand where this new slate of visceral, kinetic and blood-soaked style of action films came from we have to go back to 2011. The wave is instead only beginning to crest and its colour is a deep, dark crimson. This is not the beginning of some new wave of violent, blood-crazed Indonesian cinema. Rendered not only limbless but featureless. Everyone in the van, barring Ito, is killed. Assassin Ito (Joe Taslim) pulls the pin on a grenade attached to the belt of a cop as he is being taken away by van. The Night Comes For Us – a new Indonesian action movie released this past October – sanitises nothing. We may imagine it or read about it or even see it in a bloodless explosion in a Captain America movie but still its effects are sanitised. Not many people outside military or medical personnel know of the devastating effects a grenade can have on the body.
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