The Raid (2011)

There is a particular kind of action film that strips everything back to its barest mechanical components and simply asks: how good can the fighting be? Mad Max: Fury Road is one answer to that question. The Raid, released in 2011 and set almost entirely inside a crumbling Jakarta tower block, is another. Directed by Welshman Gareth Evans and produced across three countries (Indonesia, France, and the United States) through a collaboration between Celluloid Dreams, PT. Merantau Films, and XYZ Films, the film pitches a single elite police unit against a building's worth of criminals loyal to a resident drug lord. The setup is lean to the point of severity, and Evans makes no apology for that. What he was after was choreography as cinema, violence as a formal exercise, and a feature-length test of how much punishment both his cast and his audience could absorb.

Evans had already worked with lead actor Iko Uwais on Merantau (2009), an earlier Indonesian martial arts film, and the trust between director and performer shows in every sequence here. Uwais, a practitioner of the Indonesian martial art pencak silat, carries the film as rookie officer Rama, and the physicality he brings is the engine the whole thing runs on. Alongside him, Joe Taslim plays the unit's sergeant, Donny Alamsyah appears as a figure whose loyalties complicate the mission, and Yayan Ruhian, himself a pencak silat expert, turns up as the film's most memorably ferocious antagonist. Pierre Gruno rounds out the principal cast as a senior officer whose presence adds a thin layer of institutional tension to the chaos. The performances are functional rather than showy, which is precisely what Evans needed: faces you can read quickly between bursts of action, not characters requiring extended attention. If you are curious how Uwais fares when given a rather different context to work in, my review of The Night Comes for Us covers a film he also stars in that pushes the brutality even further. And for more from Evans himself, I have also written about The Raid 2, the considerably more ambitious follow-up he directed three years later.

On release, The Raid made a significant impression on critics and genre audiences alike, widely credited with reintroducing Western viewers to South-East Asian action cinema and to pencak silat as a screen discipline. Its influence on subsequent action filmmaking, both in terms of close-quarters choreography and the stripped-back single-location premise, was considerable and fairly immediate. Whether the film is more than the sum of its fight sequences is the more interesting question, and one worth sitting with before reading any further.

The Raid is basically two hours of non-stop punching, kicking, shooting, and climbing stairwells. No frills, no breaks, and barely any plot. It’s a simple premise: a rookie cop and his team get trapped in a high-rise full of criminals and have to fight their way out. That’s it. No twists, no deep characters, no emotional arcs, just action from minute one to the end. And honestly? The action is incredible. The choreography is tight, brutal, and insanely well-shot. You can actually follow what’s happening, which is more than you can say for most modern action films. But outside of the fight scenes, there’s not much here. The story’s paper-thin, the dialogue is forgettable, and the whole thing’s drenched in a dull, grey-green filter that makes every scene look like a damp basement. It’s functional, sure, but it doesn’t exactly scream visual flair. You’re not watching this for the cinematography or the script, you’re here for the roundhouse kicks and bone-crunching takedowns. And that’s fine. Sometimes you just want a solid beat-’em-up. But The Raid never tries to be more than that, and it never really surprises you either. It’s one-dimensional, no doubt. Great for a Friday night with zero brainpower required, but don’t expect anything deeper.

That tension between craft and substance is one I keep coming back to with action films generally. When the choreography is this precise and this confident, it almost makes the thin plotting feel like a deliberate choice rather than a limitation, but I am not sure it earns that charitable reading. The grey-green visual palette especially bothers me on reflection: a film this committed to the physical spectacle of bodies moving through space deserves a look that does more to differentiate one corridor from the next. For all its reputation, The Raid sits in a curious place for me, genuinely admirable in one very specific department, and fairly hollow everywhere else. It is the kind of film you remember for individual moments rather than as a whole, which is probably the most honest thing you can say about it.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2011  | Watched: 2025-08-26

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for The Raid (2011) on YouTube

Where to watch

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