BIFF 12 - The Raid - Cinema Review

'falls into and fails to remedy so many of the genre problems that there's no way this can be considered a remarkable success'

The Raid perhaps suffers from dramatically increased expectations, thanks to every man and his dog - and, more pertinently, people like Empire - sticking five star ratings on to it and labelling it as the best action film since things like Die Hard. Even accounting for this though the film, on general release in the UK in two weeks time, looks drastically like a case of The Emperor's New Clothes. Sure, it's fast and stylised, with well choreographed fight scenes but is this really, really, what passes as a perfect film these days?

For a start - and very unlike things such as Die Hard - the plot is absolutely as thin as the proverbial wafer mint. There's no attempts at embellishment or background. Iko Uwais' squad needs to storm a building of baddies to get to the ultimate baddie. There's no more motivation for anything than just that sketchy outline. You aren't even given a real reason to absolutely despise ultimate criminal overlord Ray Sahetapy. Sure he's bad, but he's never Hans Gruber level awful. The token offerings he dispatches with at the start, for example, are all anonymous, giving you no reason to care about what he's doing. In Die Hard, many of Gruber's victims were given a scene demonstrating that they might have been good people that we cared about. Take the above and reverse it for Uwais' Rama. We knew John McClane was good because he made us laugh. Rama barely gets any lines beyond the obvious collection of 'I'll come back for you's and 'let me in, or we're dead's.

Uwais' hero is though pumped through his bid for survival/all out war-waging by a Mike Shinoda soundtrack and this, coupled with Welshman Gareth Evans' kinetic and unfussy direction does lend the fight scenes some individuality and flair. The perfectly judged dispatching of a falling henchman through an open window is genius and the subtle minutiae like this play well against grander gestures such as the fridge scene, which takes Indiana Jones 4's approach to household appliances, reverses it and makes it more believable.

The ultimate verdict on the film is that it's a good action movie with some great ideas but it falls into and fails to remedy so many of the genre problems that there's no way this can be considered a remarkable success. Take Rama's wife for example. She's in one scene, just long enough for you to see that she's pregnant. If that doesn't signify a just-above average action film then there's loads more here that does.

The Raid is released in UK cinemas on 18th May 2012.

The 18th Bradford International Film Festival runs from 19th - 29th April at The National Media Museum and several satellite venues in and around Bradford. It includes a European Features competition, the Shine Short Film Award and several major UK premieres and retrospectives.