The Raid -- Redemption

Why do people pay money to attend martial arts movies?  To see the fighting.  And the more fighting, the better.  By this logic, which seems impeccable to me, the ultimate martial arts movie would contain nothing but fighting -- that is, no plot, no characters except fighting machines, limited dialogue, no political or social themes, no Stimmung or atmosphere, just one battle after another until the protagonists are reduced to two figures locked in a duel to the death.  This atrocious logic governs The Raid - Redemption, a continuous "point and shoot" spectacle that comes as close to pure abstraction as any movie devised for popular consumption that I've ever seen.  

Long before dawn, a handsome young cop rises, completes his morning prayers on his prayer rug (apparently, he's Muslim), expends a lot of energy pounding at a punching bag demonstrating his lightning quick hands, and, then, tenderly says goodbye to this pregnant wife -- later, he will remember this farewell in a moment of respite from one of the hundred or so lethal battles in which he is involved.  This is about the extent of characterization allowed by the frenzied narrative comprising this film.  A group of about two-dozen heavily armed cops rides in armored personnel carriers through some shabby-looking east Asian city.  We're told that they are raiding a tenement building controlled by a bad guy, Tama, some kind of Indonesian crime lord.  Tama has two lieutenants, a slender handsome guy and a puny little hoodlum called Mad Dog on account of his fearsome fighting prowess.  When we first see Tama, he's cheerfully executing about a  half-dozen victims for some unexplained infraction.  When he runs out of bullets, he uses a claw hammer to finish off the last couple thugs.  Tama is hanging out with slender handsome guy (sort of the brains of the operation) and Mad Dog who looks, and acts, like a scrawny Indonesian Joe Pesci.  Tama has a bank of monitors that show him the corridors and stair wells of the shabby seven-story tenement that he oversees from its top floor.  The cops invade the tenement and, for the first half hour, the film treats us to spectacular fire fights with automatic weapons.  Thousands of rounds are fired and most of the cops end up dead.  The hero with the pregnant wife encounters Mad Dog who has him in the gunsights of his pistol.  Mad Dog and our protagonist go into one of the bleak, if roomy, chambers of the apartment building to fight mano a mano.  The hero has lost his machine gun (it's out of ammo anyway) and Mad Dog says that killing people with firearms is no fun anyhow and so he puts his revolver aside-- "It's like ordering take-out," he says, in a genuinely funny line.  So the two men fight interminably with judo chops, kicks, and lots of bone-splintering spins and dives..  Since we are merely at the film's half-way point, the fight, although gruesome and protracted, is inconclusive.  By this time, everyone has abandoned firearms and the fights involve men armed with machetes.  But, after a few more minutes, the machetes are abandoned and The Raid delivers what we came to see --  that is, lavishly choreographed karate fights.  This goes on without respite for about 45 minutes and becomes extremely tedious, at least as far as I was concerned, although, I concede, that if you're a fan of balletic fisticuffs this stuff would probably possess some appeal.  The cast gets winnowed down to Mad Dog and Tama's handsome lieutenant and the protagonist with the pregnant wife.  (Tama gets shot unceremoniously by some spoil sport before the final fight between Mad Dog and the young cop who is now allied with the handsome criminal who turns out to be his brother who has gone over to the dark side.  The brother is redeemed and, with the cop with the pregnant wife, they battle Mad Dog.  Mad Dog is outnumbered and wounded to boot, but  he's one tough hombre and doesn't go down without an epic struggle.  In this climactic fight, we sympathize with the beleaguered Mad Dog who is after all fighting two enemies at once, both of them skilled warriors -- in some ways, the movie is so narratively inept (or indifferent is a better word) that it really doesn't care that our allegiance has now switched over to the under (Mad) Dog.  

The movie is totally pointless and futile.  But it's got a number of bravura sequences.  In one scene, the hero is hiding behind some sort of false wall, in a nasty crevasse in the hulking building.  One of the army of bad guys (who exist only to be killed in picturesque ways) thrusts a huge machete through the wall, splitting over the hero's cheek with a wound about a half-inch deep in which the blade is left resting whilst the man wielding the knife gets distracted by other mayhem nearby.  When he pulls the blade back through the wall, the effect makes you wince -- although this showy scene lacks plausibility in that the bad guy doesn't notice that the blade is all gory thereby signifying someone actually hiding behind the wall he was probing.  There are some impressive long-take fights in which the hero dispatches an army of machete-wielding villains with fists and feet.  (These have some of the glamor of the touchstone scene of this kind, the jawdropping fight with the hammer in Park Chn-wook's Old Boy.)  The tenement building is a bizarre structure with weirdly blotched concrete walls, big patches of rising damp, as it were. in the rooms and wide corridors lined with old dark wooden doors, some of them primitively numbered.  The stairwells are smeared with colorful graffiti and when people get their brains blown out against these walls, there's a colorful, even painterly, aspect to these killings that creates a sort of Basquiat-like effect.  The sullen-looking blemished walls are adorned with bright plumes and sprays of blood.  The rooms aren't differentiated in any way -- they all look more or less alike although some of them have fire extinguishers, waste bins, some furniture that can be busted up in the duels, and vestigial kitchens.  It doesn't matter where the fighting takes place -- it could be anywhere and the claustrophobic dens and hallways are really just the scenery of a computer first-person shooter.  At the University of Minnesota Art Museum, there's an installation by Ed Kienholz that represents, a shabby corridor in some flophouse apartment, brooding wooden doors shut against the hallway where the carpet is stained and where a small battered table displays an ashtray full of decaying butts.  The thing is called Pedicord Apartments (it's actually by Kienholz wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz)  and, when you press your ears against the sinister-looking doors, you can hear people moving around inside, someone crying, and man and a woman trading insults, or radio playing a ball game.  The physical apparatus of Raid - Redemption reminded me of that artwork and I thought the ugly anonymous building where the fighting takes place was the best thing in the movie.

The director, Gareth Huw Evans, seemingly knows what he is doing and he winks at the audience.  There's one lurid scene in which a bad guy has fired all his rounds and, with trembling hand, tries to reload his pistol.  He's hiding in one of the bleak, abstract chambers in the building and his face sweats and his hands tremble and the camera rotates around him to show his fear and agitation as he tries to insert bullets in his gun.  At last, he succeeds, steps out of the shadows, and is immediately shot through the throat with his own gun twisted around by the cop in order to kill him.  It's a scene that's ironic and demonstrates the folly of the whole enterprise, something that Evans seems to richly appreciate.