Film Illiterate, wherein the proprietor records movies seen, and sporadic progress through assorted lists of the "best". Originally started after regretfully renting something forgettable for the third time. I've forgotten what, but never again! A tedious endeavour since 2005. Hello. 🙂
An Indonesian SWAT team attempts to take down a crimelord holed up at the top of a tenement filled with murderous minions/tenants; in finest action-flick form, they punch and they kick and they stab and they shoot until finally there is no more punching and kicking and stabbing and shooting to do.
Dismissing it as nothing but fight scenes is to do the film a disservice, however; writer/director Gareth Evans does build the pace nicely. Early scenes, in which the team takes the first several floors by stealth to avoid alerting their main target, are a suspenseful ticking timebomb for the eventual explosion we all know is coming. The action itself builds in cruelty, too, with the audience's winces and groans of appreciation heavily end-loaded. (The most gruesome takedown involves the broken end of a fluorescent light-tube jammed into a killer's throat.)
It's not a "fighting" movie, per se, though there is a lot of hand-to-hand combat; there is a lot of shooting, too. More than anything, it takes me back to the R-rated action movies of the 80s and 90s, like Showdown in Little Tokyo (only without the sex). My strongest memory of Bloodsport, to name another, is a scene where a particularly vicious kick snaps a man's knee. When I was 12 years old, I thought that was just great -- and The Raid is perhaps the purest example I've ever seen of vicious action that my 12-year-old self would have loved.
It's action done right.