A ten-man police squad enters a rundown Jakarta tenement to arrest the drug lord who controls it floor by floor, and within minutes the building itself turns against them: locked stairwells, a compromised position, and dozens of tenants and enforcers between the team and the exit.
Gareth Evans sets the entire film inside that one structure, so the problem is never about solving a case, it is about surviving a floor.
Evans, a Welsh director who moved to Indonesia to make a documentary on the martial art pencak silat, built The Raid around what he found there: a fighting style he had never seen used on screen, and a performer, Iko Uwais, who was working as a delivery driver and silat instructor when Evans cast him. Uwais and fellow silat practitioner Yayan Ruhian both starred in and co-choreographed the film's combat, shaping sequences around the art's close, joint-locking technique rather than the wire work common to Western action cinema at the time.
The film's case rests on how deliberately it paces its own brutality. Rather than compressing fights into quick bursts, Evans lets each encounter run long, tracking every exchange in wide, legible shots so the geography of a stairwell becomes part of the choreography. That patience, and the dark, understated humor threaded through the violence, is what carried the film when it opened the Toronto International Film Festival's Midnight Madness program in 2011 and took that section's audience award.
Availability varies by region and changes often, so confirm current streaming or rental options on PLOT before pressing play. At 101 minutes, The Raid is a tight, single-sitting watch best suited to viewers who want momentum over exposition.
