REVIEWS The Raid REVIEWED BY MARK ADAMS
Indonesian action flick The Raid is a bone- crunching piece of brutally cool entertainment that really delivers in terms of all-out entertain- ment. Martial-arts action films tend to be niche affairs aimed at their loyal fanbase, but this stylish and smart film could well find an audience savvy to its well-staged and extremely bloody mayhem. Written and directed by Welsh film-maker
Gareth Huw Evans — who made the successful martial-arts film Merantau in 2009 — The Raid features extensive and skilful use of the tradi- tional Indonesian combat style of ‘silat’, exten- sively featured in the more traditional Merantau. For The Raid, Evans opts for a contemporary
action tale that blends Assault On Precinct 13, Die Hard and the 2002 French actioner The Nest (aka Wasp’s Nest). It stars Iko Uwais, who starred in Merantau, as Rama, a rookie cop who has to use all his skills to take on a horde of machete-wield- ing bad guys. Rama is part of a SWAT team sent to clean out
a rundown apartment block in Jakarta ruled by Tama (Sahetapy), a ruthless drug lord who uses the tenement to shelter junkies as well as his enforcers, killers and drugs manufacturers, watching over the building via closed circuit tele- vision. But Tama is expecting the SWAT team and his heavily armed gang ambush the police and, after
Life Without Principle REVIEWED BY LEE MARSHALL
There are some good ideas knocking around in Hong Kong genre auteur Johnnie To’s multi- strand financial crisis dramedy, but they are swamped by an inept script that becomes bogged down in details and forgets the big dramatic pic- ture. The film does have the merit of rendering,
with a certain ironic detachment, the human side of the profits and losses generated by stock-market meltdown in a money-oriented urban hothouse like Hong Kong. To’s output of two or three films a year (this is
number two for 2011) generally pans out between local-consumption comedies and festival-pleasing Triad actioners or police procedurals. With its
MIDNIGHT MADNESS
Indo. 2011. 100mins Director/screenplay/ editor Gareth Huw Evans Production company PT Merantau Films/XYZ Films International sales Celluloid Nightmares, www.celluloid-dreams. com/nightmares Producer Ario Sagantoro Executive producer Maya Barack-Evans Cinematography Matt Flannery Production designer Moti D Setyanto Music Fajar Yuskemal, Aria Prayogi Main cast Iko Uwais, Yayan Ruhian, Joe Taslim, Doni Alamsyah, Ray Sahetapy
killing most of them in a gun battle, sets out to track down the injured survivors through the building. Rama is cut off from his team and, drag- ging a wounded colleague, uses his spectacular martial-arts skills to take out the brutal enforcers. What follows is a feast of action. If the first part
of the film feels like a modern US cops-in-peril action movie then the second half is a resolutely martial-arts fight fest. Youthful Uwais is a genial
and unassuming presence, but when he is called on to fight he is nothing short of spectacular. Evans stages his film with style and precision.
The gunfight sequences are hectic and appropri- ately messy, and he moves the camera intelli- gently to emphasise the visceral action. He clearly works with a top action choreography team and stunt performers, offering up some awesome martial-arts moments.
SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS
HK. 2011. 106mins Director/producer Johnnie To Production companies Media Asia Films, Milkyway Image International sales Media Asia Distribution,
www.mediaasia.com Executive producer John Chong Screenplay Au Kin Yee, Wong King Fai, Milkyway Creative Team Cinematography Cheng Siu-Keung Editor David Richardson Production designer Sukie Yip Main cast Lau Ching Wan, Richie Jen, Denise Ho, Myolie Wu, Philip Keung, Terence Yin
comedic thrust, artsy choral structure and (in part) gangland settings, Life Without Principle (Duo Ming Jin) looks like an attempt to bridge the two genres. But it is a hybrid that is unlikely to translate into the sort of East-West box-office crossover achieved by Exiled or Mad Detective. The three characters, and stories, that intertwine
in the course of the film each get such a leisurely run-up that we are a third of the way in before we have begun to tease out the dramatic thread that unites them. Plot strand one — easily the thinnest — focuses on serious, honourable detective Che- ung (Jen), a heartthrob who is absorbed by his job, much to the frustration of his fiancée, Connie (Wu), who is trying to make him commit to putting a downpayment on an apartment. The second and most dramatically coherent
story is that of Teresa (Ho), an under-pressure clerk in a bank where ‘financial products’ are the new mantra and each employee is judged by his or her performance in selling them. Strand number three focuses on Panther (Wan),
a low-grade gangland henchman with a comic range of facial tics, who is scrupulously honest and indelibly servile. It is not until well over an hour in that Panther’s strand coalesces into something more incisive, when the search for bail money takes him to old friend Lung (Keung), who runs a backstreet business operation that helps people to play the futures market online. To usually serves up wok-fuls of visual style and
a lush Hong Kong soundscape, but Life Without Principle disappoints on this front: everything looks shot in a hurry, and though an a cappella musical theme with a Michel Legrand-feel lends a certain jaunty something, we yearn for the stylish- ness of Sparrow or The Mission.
n 16 Screen International at the Toronto Film Festival September 11, 2011
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