Action movies come in waves. In the 1980s, brawny action heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone held down the genre with their considerable charisma. In the late ’90s, The Matrix helped usher in an era of high-flying wirework. And in the 2010s, the John Wick franchise brought things back down to earth with its kinetic, close-quarters fight sequences.
Keanu Reeves headlines both The Matrix and the John Wick movies, so he may have more influence on modern action films than any other person alive. But John Wick didn’t come out of nowhere. A few years before the first John Wick film debuted in theaters in 2014, the Indonesian film The Raid: Redemption established the blueprint that action movies are still following today.
No one watches The Raid for the plot
But here it is anyway
The plot of The Raid: Redemption is simple: rookie police officer Rama (Iko Uwais) is part of a task force meant to raid an apartment building with the purpose of arresting Tama (Ray Sahetapy), a crime lord who runs his drug operation out of there. We see that Rama has a pregnant wife at home, and that’s about all the buildup we get before the chaos starts.
Once Rama and his fellow officers breach the building, Tama comes over the loudspeaker and announces that anyone who kills the officers will get to live in the building rent-free. That’s all a lot of the residents need to hear to break out their machetes and go to war. Many of Rama’s colleagues are killed, and for the few that remain, the mission becomes less about arresting Tama and more about getting out of here alive.
There is a little more to the plot. It turns out that Rama’s brother Andi (Donny Alamsyah) is working for Tama, which is part of the reason Rama took this assignment in the first place. So that gives us an emotional through-line, but mainly the plot is an excuse to string together a series of spectacular fight scenes. Rama faces down thugs in the hallway, there’s a spectacular fight in a narcotics lab, and there are multiple fights featuring Tama’s short-but-terrifying enforcer Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian), who is a one-man full-service martial arts showcase. It’s exhausting just watching this movie, in the best way possible.
The Raid vs John Wick
Guns vs fists vs feet vs fear
Three years later, John Wick would embrace the simplicity of The Raid. In that movie, we meet John Wick, and we learn that he has a dead wife and a dog he loves very much. The dog is killed, and he spends the rest of the movie exacting furious vengeance upon the people dumb enough to do it, and on anyone who gets in his way for good measure. This is a million miles from The Matrix, which found time for eye-popping action scenes in between long explanations about the nature of reality. After The Raid, action movies want to get us to the point.
John Wick director Chad Stahelski has named The Raid: Redemption as one of his five favorite films, and it’s very easy to see the influence. Like in The Raid, the John Wick movies eschew shaky cameras, quick cuts, and close-ups in fight scenes, instead favoring long, steady shots where we can actually see that the actors are performing stunts and executing martial arts moves. Both John Wick and Rama fight with brutal intensity, showing they mean business and are fond of delivering a final killing blow before moving on to the next target. We see both of them get tired during fights, which lends them an air of vulnerability…not that it ever seems to last long. There are always more grunts to mow down.
There’s also the relentlessness of the pace. The Raid: Redemption is basically one long action scene with a few breaks in between, which wasn’t something many audiences were used to beforehand. The John Wick movies have made this structure a staple. Chad Stahelski made The Raid influence explicit when he brought on franchise veterans Yayan Ruhian and Cecep Arif Rahman for John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, where they play a pair of elite assassins sent to kill our hero.
The Raid: Redemption is the foundation for modern action movies
And it’s just as impressive today
The influence of The Raid: Redemption goes beyond the John Wick franchise. The creators of the Marvel series Daredevil have cited it as an inspiration for the show’s famous fight scenes, which are often done in long, unbroken takes. You can see the influence of The Raid in films like Atomic Blonde, Nobody, Extraction, and especially Dredd, which is also set in a crime-riddled apartment building that the heroes have to fight through, floor by floor.
Director Gareth Edwards would go on to make a sequel to The Raid: Redemption simply called The Raid 2, which moves the action out of an apartment building and into the streets. The film is much longer and more complicated than the original, but just as good.
The Raid 3 when?
There has been talk of a third Raid movie for over a decade, with updates trickling in here or there over the years. We can only hope it comes to pass, because this team hasn’t missed yet. Maybe it will materialize alongside John Wick 5. In the meantime, you can stream The Raid: Redemption on Hulu.
