Please don't spend money on this.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

There is definitely an excellent idea hidden in the background of the film. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find it.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Job well done, director Gareth Evans! This was an action-packed thrill ride with great visuals and photography. Fast-paced and brutal, the fight scenes are incredibly well choreographed. Be warned, though, this is a very, very violent film, but done with style. The stunts are amazing.Iko Uwais was fantastic as the protagonist and it is no wonder he was approached by Hollywood after this film. I loved the music, as well. This is a superb production, although it might not appeal to everyone due to the violence.

The movie takes place in the slums of Jakarta Indonesia. There is a drug overlord who is named Tama Riyadi. In the film, a swat team begins their mission to take down this drug lord. He lives in his apartment with all of his minions and associates. The swat team attempts their invasion of the building but are caught in a dangerous situation when their cover is blown. They are now trapped within the building and are lead by Lieutenant Wahyu in a deadly and action packed fight to survive. There is no backup coming to save them. There is no escape as the swat team would be killed if caught outside without cover. Their only option is to fight their way through Tama's men and kill the drug lord. I really enjoyed watching this film. One of my favorite scenes in the movie was when Rama and Dagu create a makeshift bomb to survive one of the many battles. This to me showed the extensive military training these men had. Another part that I enjoyed was when Mad Dog challenged Jaka to a fair fight with hand to hand combat. This was really cool as I love the hand to hand combat fight scenes and the choreography that it requires to make it look realistic. I really enjoyed the ending as it seemed relatively happy which, although I was always hoping for, I wasn't sure it would actually happen because it is not always guaranteed in foreign films which is exciting.

A freaking masterpiece. The greatest action film ever made, seriously. Elite cops vs a building full of guys with guns, knives, machetes and a very mad dog. This must have been my third time watching it. I didn't even hunt it down, came on TV and I had to watch it AND right after watching it I had to hunt down the sequel and watch that too. This is a must watch for any action junkie.

Double bill time, Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans has made a big splash with his action one-two punch which puts the Indonesian martial art "Pencak Silat" on a bigger map. Swimming against the tide of an inexorably digitized world, since the noughties, action movies have been experiencing a somewhat fundamentalistic revolution ushered in by ONG-BAK: THE THAI WARRIOR (2003), where a more tactile, point-blank and lethal combat style greatly relying on the performers' physical prowess sounding the death knell for a plethora of CGI-heavy schlock, and Gareth Evans takes the revolution further down that road, at any time of the day, it is more than welcomingBlanketed in its slate blue hue, THE RAID: REDEMPTION has a setting like a single-location entrapment horror flick, a catastrophic heavy blow incurs to a team of elite squad when they raid inside a tenement tower block owned by the crime lord Tama Riyado (Sahetapy) in Jakarta's slums, it turns out to be a set-up as a corollary of corruption among police top-brass. Assailed by not zombies but practically zombie-looking inhabitants (bedraggled drug addicts mostly) and a cohort of Tama's henchmen, they might find some painful irony (if they are still breathing) from recollecting the paradoxical pep talk of Sergeant Jaka (Taslim), who is leading the raid, paraphrasing here: it is a highly dangerous mission, but I don't want to see any of those seats empty when we return. The one who is bestowed with a protagonist nimbus is Rama (Uwais), a tyro in the forces and has an ax to grind in the game, when all the ammo is expended, his killer martial art skill starts to tip the scale in the bloodshed. Since its no-account story-line seldom fluctuates with plot development (barring a fraternal reunion), and although many tropes of suspense routinely deployed to the hilt, it is the action pieces taking our breath away, the go-for-the-jugular (joints, limbs, and other more cardinal parts) pragmatism and Evans' lenience on blood and guts, skewered together one set piece after another, our rapt attention becomes a given, and the brutal aesthetics reaches its crescendo in the close-range combat between Rama, his brother Andi (Alamsyah) and Tama's top muscle, a disheveled Mad Dog (Ruhian, who is a martial art virtuoso and the fight choreographer for both movies, also plays a completely different character in the sequel). After REDEMPTION successfully testing the water, THE RAID 2: BERANDAL (which means thug in Indonesian) is expectedly souped up by a significantly boosted budget and an ampler length (150 minutes, 50 minutes longer than the first installment). Mapping out an ambitious gangster turf war saga, Evans' script swiftly sends Rama to the joint to befriend Uco (Putra), the son of Bangun (Pakusadewo), one of the two kingpins of Jakarta's underworld, where a muddy mêlèe during a downpour set alight the first frisson of excitement (it is a virtue Evans doesn't overuse the worn- out slo-mo shtick, after THE MATRIX 1999 and its countless emulators, enough is enough). In fact, the resultant story veers more towards Uco's ill-conceived subversion, and Putra, not quite a martial artist himself but commendably takes up the gauntlet as a pompous gilded youth, too thrusting and wanting both wits and patience to mellow into a rightful heir of his father's cosmic empire, particularly when there is nothing to imperil his standing, what is the fuss anyway? Maybe like in every patriarch's incubus, he is just a bad seed and driven at lengths to carry out a patricidal sin, Putra's performance is vehement, visceral and transforms Uco as the film's heart of matter, a grab bag of what is wrong with today's youngsters. In the action section, on the one hand, Evans continues choreographing striking fighting sequences of Pencak Silat, and playing up the possibility of orchestration within a two-by-four space (a prison bathroom, or inside a barreling car); on the other hand, in tandem with an enclosed fistfight, he also cuts his teeth into a sterling car chase set piece with an ace in his sleeve, and what an adrenaline rush it spurs! Although it would be remiss of me to not mention a congenital hiccup rather common in action fares, those conspicuous ready-to-take-the-hit poses or caesuras, mostly from foot soldiers during their meager screen-time, it immediately dispels the "realness" of all the onerously rehearsed teamwork. The most pyrotechnic eye-catcher is indubitably the final showdown between Rama and the karambit-knives-wielding killer, credited as the Assassin (Rahman), which makes Very Tri Yulisman's Baseball Bat Man and Julie Estelle's Hammer Girl quite bathetic in their gore-fest, not to mention the boss who prefers heavy weaponry but is inept enough to toss it to the wrong one when the crunch comes.Both movies are cracking genre pieces made with labor of love, devotion and dexterity, and Evans' directorial flair takes a crucial peg up under the sequel's grander scale, blissfully, one can see the potential in a filmmaker which can unbridle the genre parameters.