The Raid: Redemption

There are traditional action movies and then there’s The Raid: Redemption, an unapologetically ultraviolent exercise in mayhem that likes its blood and its guts in large doses.

The movie takes place in Indonesia, of all places, and is the brainchild of Gareth Evans, a Welsh-born filmmaker with the ability to inject visual flair into just about any type of fight sequence.

Essentially, that’s what The Raid is — a feature-length compilation of bone-crunching fights revolving around a rather generic good-against-evil plot with the intensity cranked up so high that just watching it is almost a physically exhausting experience.

The film takes place almost entirely inside of a rundown urban apartment building, where a unit of highly trained police officers arrives with a nighttime mission to take down a notorious drug lord and his henchmen. That’s not as easy as it seems when the resident thugs put the high-rise on lockdown, turning it into a battle not for justice but for survival.

For Evans, the film is a follow-up to another Indonesian martial-arts movie called Merantau (2009), which also was a showcase for the indigenous weapons-based fighting style known as pencak silat. The filmmaker gained appreciation for the discipline while making a documentary several years back.

However, part of the film’s appeal is the variety of combat on display. What starts with a series of shootouts scales back to a stream of knife and weapon battles, and then to scenes of old-fashioned man-to-man brawling. The absurdly high body count is achieved with as much gleefully over-the-top creativity as possible, of course.

By the way, Evans apparently won’t be involved in an American remake that is already in the works, but he will offer a sequel (presumably with different characters, since most of these are dead).

Besides the top-notch stuntwork and fight choreography, the movie benefits from Matt Flannery’s cinematography that makes the most of the interior setting, and a pulsating score from Joseph Trapanese and Mike Shinoda of the band Linkin Park.

The screenplay doesn’t allow much room for emotional depth or character development, and sometimes throws story logic out the window, but none of it seems to matter when the bullets and fists are flying at such a breakneck pace.

In other words, for those who subscribe to the familiar description of a chick flick, The Raid is the exact opposite.

Rated R, 101 minutes.