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BY PAULA SCHWARTZ
NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM
MOVIE REVIEW
We admit it might be near impossible to get psyched about the box office take of any other film besides “The Hunger Games” after its gargantuan record-crashing $155 million weekend, but “The Raid: Redemption,” a much-hyped Indonesian martial arts film that also opened Friday, pulled in some impressive numbers, especially for an indie specialty film. According to Box Office Mojo, it opened in 14 theaters and grossed $221,000 on its meager $1.1 million budget. (“The Hunger Games” had a reported $80 million budget.)
Gareth Huw Evans, the soft-spoken Welsh director of “The Raid: Redemption” was in New York Thursday night at a screening of his film at the Museum of Modern Art. “A gentle movie for a genteel place,” is how he introduced his film, warning the audience – in an understatement - they might find it a “little violent.” (The film was shown as part of the New Directors –New Films series that runs through April 1 at MoMa and the Walter Reade Theater.)
“The Raid: Redemption” has already made the film festival circuit, including Sundance, Toronto and South by Southwest, winning over genre fanboys, including one who greeted the director after the screening and told him – after introducing the director to his girlfriend - that he’d already followed the film around the country and seen it three times. Mr. Evans recognized him and laughingly called him one of the film’s “groupies.”
“The Raid: Redemption” (and we have no idea when the redemption part comes in) is about a police SWAT team that storms a housing project to take down a drug lord (Ray Sahetapy) and his mobsters. The elite fighters, including rookie cop Rama (played by an impressive Iko Uwais, who is also a fight choreographer for the film) come in with an arsenal, including machine guns, grenades and every kind of impressive handgun, but they are outmatched and outnumbered by machete-wielding gangsters with flying fists and feet, who don’t die easy and look like they haven’t bathed in weeks. The scariest of the bunch is the smallest, Mad Dog, played by Yayan Ruhian (the film’s other fight choreographer) with a fierce intensity and agility, whose scowl behind a curtain of greasy hair makes him look even more menacing and deranged than his ferocious fighting. In one scene with one of the main characters, good-guy cop Jaka (Joe Taslim), Mad Dog challenges him to mortal hand-to-hand combat even though he could just as easily shoot him in the face because it just wouldn’t give him the “same rush.”
