The Raid: Redemption, aka Beat 'em Up, the Movie

The Raid: Redemption is a film about the hardships of maintaining a relationship and pursuing a career in a highly competitive field.  Through a series of vignettes, mostly set in the homes of the lead protagonists as they balance personal and professional life, the viewer becomes witness to the joys and failures of the ensemble cast, sometimes without a word spoken between characters for several minutes because a simple closeup on their haunted eyes,  or a gentle sigh accomplishes more than words or even action can ever hope to.

Hah, I'm just jerking you around!  Can you imagine the pain I'd go through reviewing a movie as boring and pretentious as that?   No thanks, friend-o.  The Raid is actually a hyperactive martial arts flick from Indonesia.  It's like Saw meets The Warriors meets the 80s Nintendo game "Bad Dudes".  You know, the game that challenged your manhood by asking: "Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?"  Well let me assure you, once the generics/red shirts from Team Law have been wiped out in this movie, you're left with some pretty bad fucking dudes.

But they're not out to save the president in this movie.  Their mission is to go into this high rise building  and arrest an infamous crime boss who sublets the rooms to the scum of society.  By the time the movie starts, the building is chock full of rapists, murderers, drug dealers, music pirates and people who reproduced football games without the express written consent of the NFL.  This makes him the bane of the local homeowners association, so it's time for the cops to lock, load, and take this fucker down to Chinatown...  Or downtown Jakarta, I guess.

The movie starts with some gunfights, but a convenient explosion either messes up the SWAT teams firearms, or they just didnt bring enough ammo.  Either way, the rest of the movie is an exercise in figuring out the most brutal way to kill your enemy with bare hands and melee weapons this side of the Dark Ages.  In true Game of Death style, the battle rages up the building, leaving a trail of bodies to follow in case someone loses their way (I swear we've passed that dead guy already) until a fight with the last boss and some required plot resolution.

With a basically non-existant plot, the fights are what make this movie worth the time.  The main martial art used in the movie is Silat, an Indonesian martial art similar to the Filipino Martial Arts I've studied in that it was designed to kill people at close range, often with knives/bladed weapons and sticks and attacks to areas other Martial arts practitioners are often not cool with.  Hey, we're little island folks; stomping on knee joints, stabbing in the thigh and dragging the blade through as many arteries as possible is how we level the playing field.  Its not all fancy kung foolery on this movie either.  When the opportunity presents itself, the heroes of The Raid arent above pushing their enemies people out windows or giving someone a fire axe to the chest.  There were several moments where I let out that "Ooohhhh!" sound usually reserved for when somebody gets posterized in basketball.

In conclusion, if you are an aficionado of martial arts flicks, action movies, or those old video games where you walk through a city beating up everyone in your path, you'll like The Raid.  And now's the time to check it out if you haven't, because the sequel The Raid: Retaliation comes out soon.  Director Gareth Evans also says he's got a trilogy planned.  I only hope it isnt called The Raid: Revolutions,  because that didn't pan out so well for the Matrix.

Obligatory amazon shilling below!  (I do not condone using the weapons below on anything other than cardboard, brush, or water bottles.  I am not responsible for the actions of dumbasses.  The opinions and views in this blog are not necessarily those of The Halo Equation or Ben Maniquis, even when explicitly stated that they are my views.  Stop reading and watch the damn movie.)

Watch on blu-ray!

Watch with Amazon Instant Video!

Seriously, I don't know why I'm linking the stuff below...  They just
seem loosely related to the movie and the style of Martial Arts.  

The World's End

And the world was no more.  The apocalypse came and all we know and love was reduced to ash and smoldering ruin...  But I'm not here to discuss the fan reaction to Ben Affleck being cast as Batman, this is a review about Edgar Wright's latest flick (and 3rd in the "Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy") The World's End.  While the Batman announcement generated enough publicity and created a hashmark surplus large enough to shade and texture the Japanese Manga industry for two centuries, Wright, Pegg, Frost, and the rest of the usual suspects put out yet another ridiculously entertaining movie.

Pegg takes on the role Gary King, 12-step Escapee and lead instigator to a group of five formerly hard-drinking, hard-partying British youths, now all grown up with careers and wives, etc. aside for Gary, who remains obsessed with (among other things) completing a 12-pub challenge that he failed so many years ago.  A time when bands like Depeche Mode, The Pixies, Sonic Youth, and Janes Addiction were all the rage.  (Holy crap, just rattling those bands off makes me kind of nostalgic for the early 90's.)

Gary is an annoying alcoholic who still manages to convince his mature friends to reluctantly head back to their hometown and make one final attempt at the epic pub crawl known as "the Golden Mile".  The performance is very good and a nice change from the previous two movies where Frost was the one playing Id to Pegg's more responsible characters.  It's a good thing he can keep your attention and only be borderline too annoying, because the film for about forty minutes has nothing to do with robots or aliens.  I almost feel like I should tag that as a spoiler, because if you came into this movie knowing nothing about it (or Wright and Pegg's film making history together), you'd think this was one of those charming English Comedies like the The Full Monty, Billy Elliot, or when Jeremy Clarkson beat up Piers Morgan.

But yes, a little more than a third into the movie, things get more than a little out of hand as they tend to do in Edgar Wright movies (and real-life pub crawls).  There's an alien invasion, replicants, well-choreographed fight scenes that get more outrageous as the characters build up Super Saiyan levels of Dutch Courage with every pint consumed.  Throughout it all, they actually manage to keep a hold on the human elements, something that sometimes goes missing in the big action "blockbuster" movies when it becomes about how many CG buildings the FX house can annihilate.  There's a strange anti nanny-state message throughout that I didn't expect, but totally dig because with all the government spying stuff in the news nowadays, (Hi NSA, if you're reading this, please click on my Amazon Affiliate links!) a lot of people seem pretty concerned about being free...  To do what they want...  Any old time.

Pacific Rim

First off, today I learned that Jaegermeister means "Master Hunter".  Actually, I knew a Meister was a master of something, but in the opening seconds of Pacific Rim, they define "Jaeger" as meaning "Hunter".  It connected the dots for me.  That has nothing to do with this movie review post.

Secondly, Pacific Rim is easily the most enjoyable thing I've seen on screen this summer. It might have something to do with being an 80's/90's kid who grew up watching Voltron, Robotech and the like, but judging from the reactions of the younger set in the theater, they were having a damn good a time watching giant robots throw down with giant inter-dimensional alien beasts for 2+ hours too.  I suppose when all you've had in this genre the past few years was seen via a shaky, indestructible camcorder or involved Shia Labeouf saying "no" a lot, this was quite the treat.

The plot, if for some reason you were concerned with such things, is that monstrous Kaiju are coming to earth via a rift in the pacific ocean, wreaking havoc on mankind, and being total dicks to everyone they can get their semi-truck size claws on.  They're each about the size of skyscraper and are really pissed off all the time.  Humanity's (awesome) response to this threat is to build equally monstrous robots called Jaegers operated by two pilots who act as left and right brain lobes within the mechanical behemoth's skull.

It's pretty much a given that anything directed by Guillermo Del Toro will have a vast array of cool beasts and characters to look at, and he doesn't hold back here.  In the blue corner, the Jaegers have cool names like "Gipsy Danger", "Cherno-Alpha", and "Striker Eureka", while their opponents in the red corner bear names like "Knife Head", "Trespasser" and "Leatherback".  The level of detail and care put into designing these things, like everything else in the movie, is top notch, and they managed to give them individual identity without resorting to racist automobiles (I'm going to lay off the Transformers franchise now).

I saw the movie in IMAX 3D, which was worth the extra couple of bucks, even though it literally puts money in George Lucas's already fat wallet and I can see some people feeling a little bit like the early Jaeger pilots in some spots.  Seriously, my eyes were watering from the insane level of stuff flying around during the battle scenes.  There might have been blood coming out of my eyes.  It was pretty rad.  I theorize Del Toro wanted to make the audience get the full experience of being inside a massive robot that's linked to your brain and the brain of your co-pilot while a twenty-five-story Komodo Dragon is bitch slapping you with its tail.

In short.  This was just all out fun.  Strap in and cast off the chains of moody, introspective superheroes for a little while. Keep an eye out for homages to previous giant monster/robot films like Godzilla (and I swear the quick arm motions in one scene were straight out of Power Rangers).  Speaking of which, I've heard there's an upcoming Godzilla movie...  We'll see.