The Raid (2012)

The Raid arrives from Indonesia by way of a Welshman, and it wastes no time on anything but the business of hurting people in stairwells. A twenty-man tactical squad enters a Jakarta tenement to arrest a drug lord; the lights go out; the exits close. Roughly a hundred minutes of pencak silat, machetes, and improvised propane weaponry follow. The film has no thesis. It has a body count.

On the matter of modern cultural markers, the ledger is blank. The cast is entirely Indonesian, which reflects the country of production and the martial art at its center, not a casting initiative assembled in a Los Angeles conference room. There is no LGBTQ content, no feminist argument, no racial commentary, no climate anxiety, no critique of wealth, no body positivity, no neurodivergence, and no revision of anybody's history. The villains are drug dealers and the heroes are police, though the police are also corrupt, which is a plot mechanic instead of an indictment of late capitalism.

The film also declines to lecture. Evans implicitly folds his star's Muslim faith into the character, and then gets out of the way. Nothing is explained to us. Nothing is taught. The camera is handheld, the guns are Airsoft replicas, and the moral universe is a stairwell. In an era of cinema that hands out homework with the popcorn, this is a rare vintage: dry, brutal, uninterested in our approval of its politics. There is nothing here to agree with or object to, only choreography executed at a speed that borders on the impolite. We grade it accordingly.