The Indonesian import The Raid: Redemption is maybe the ultimate in mindless action filmmaking, yet the critics praising it can’t stop coming up with intellectual justifications for their enjoyment. To them, The Raid isn’t just another hyper, relentless fight film — it’s “chaos cinema” that “confronts the nature of movie violence” (Indiewire) and “action filmmaking distilled to its very essence” (The Globe and Mail). But the only difference between The Raid and a million other punch-and-kick films is that this one has nothing but punching and kicking (and shooting and stabbing and maiming). It may be “pure” action, but only if by “pure” we mean: stripped of any narrative interest whatsoever.
After a token “character-building” prologue in which the policeman hero (Iko Uwais) kisses his pregnant wife goodbye, we’re thrown into the back of an armoured police transport where a squad leader barks out the day’s mission: invade the ground floor of a high-rise full o’ bad guys, gradually work up to the top floor, then take out the big boss. Sort of like Donkey Kong, only less sophisticated. (The Raid isn’t the first movie to style itself after video games, but I can’t think of another that’s quite so unashamed of the fact.) With that, the fighting begins: 90 minutes of anonymous policemen in riot gear battling anonymous thugs in t-shirts and flip-flops. There’s virtually no let up, and unless you’re four, it quickly becomes alienating.
I admit I’ve never been a huge fan of fight films, but I often find myself enjoying stuff like District B13 or the Crank series simply for the artful displays of physical dexterity. But the director of The Raid, Welsh-born Gareth Evans, withholds the truly impressive moves until the last 30 minutes or so, when the few remaining avatars (“characters” is too strong a word here) finally start making use of their martial arts skills — a form known as “Silat,” which looks, to the uninitiated, like most other forms. Prior to that, the violence is largely just blunt, inelegant gunplay and beatings. Adding to the monotony, we don’t even get anyone to root for, the hero having been so poorly established he barely registers as a focal point until the final minutes. Call me old-fashioned, but if this is “pure” action filmmaking, I’ll take the adulterated kind.
Watching the movie, it occurred to me this was something I might have enjoyed in my teens. When you’re that age, anything “extreme” is entertaining, but as you get older, you need a touch of wit or style, some hint of a sensibility behind the camera. (There’s one mildly clever scene in The Raid: the hero, hidden inside a wall, has to hold perfectly still while another guy stabs the wall repeatedly with a machete.) To draw a comparison using two of the movie’s most obvious influences: I still get a huge kick out of Walter Hill’s The Warriors, because it’s dynamically shot, slyly funny, and varied in its pacing, but I no longer get much of a kick out of John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, a drab movie that depends almost entirely on the extremity of its violence. (And does anything shock less than the extreme violence of yesteryear?)
I know my lack of enthusiasm for The Raid puts me in the minority (according to Rotten Tomatoes), but I have to wonder: do the people raving about it really want to see more films like it? Even those weaned on video games would tire of all the emptiness eventually, no? The Raid isn’t remotely “pure” — it’s the epitome of fanboy soullessness.
And then we have Joshua Marston’s The Forgiveness of Blood, pictured above, which takes the opposite tack of The Raid: instead of trying to excite us, it wears its drabness like a merit badge. Using non-professional actors, Marston looks at a modern, rural Albanian family caught up in an old-fashioned blood feud, and though he sheds a bit of light on a relatively unknown subject, he gives us no reason to engage with it. This is one of the most inert movies I’ve ever seen: it’s not just that nothing happens plot-wise or that the characters reveal nothing of themselves, it’s that it’s all rendered so artlessly. Marston was a journalist before becoming a filmmaker, and it shows all-too-well here — he demonstrates none of the skills of an artist. There’s no poetry, no style, no tension, and no suspense. The film just sits there. The actors could be in a staring contest with us, waiting to see who’ll blink first.
Marston’s prior feature, Maria Full of Grace, wasn’t ultra energetic, but it had a compelling performance from Catalina Sandino Moreno and a sense of mounting, stomach-churning dread. The Forgiveness of Blood has a teen protagonist who sits on the couch all day, the rules of blood feuds dictating that a man’s sons must stay inside until the feud is resolved. The bulk of the film is taken up with low-grade observations about Albania’s odd mix of the old and the new. They live on farms, but they have cell phones! They ride horse-drawn carts, but they use Facebook! This shouldn’t need to be said, but low-grade observations aren’t enough. And yet, somehow, the film has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 86%. If you actually read the reviews, the lack of enthusiasm is palpable, but still the critics politely recommend it. What do they think, that by promoting well-intentioned mediocrity they’re helping to foster quality cinema? I literally wouldn’t trust anyone who’d recommend The Forgiveness of Blood — they’ve lost sight of what movies are for and what they can be.
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Scott MacDonald writes about cinema for Toronto Standard.
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