Law enforcers trapped in an apartment building controlled by a vicious crimelord need to fight their way out.
Depending on your movie selection this weekend in KL, this description could be applied equally to Gareth Evans' Indonesian action scorcher The Raid:Redemption or Pete Travis' Dredd , the recent and second screen incarnation of the iconic Brit comic dispenser of instant judgement.
Disregarding any plagiarism on the part of either filmmaker, both movies can be enjoyed as the purest distillation of the action movie, genre exercises done right thanks to it's makers' unswerving commitment to delivering what movies like these need: balls to the wall action, with tension ratcheted up by repellant villains capable of meting out slow and sadistic punishment and heroes' who absolutely WILL NOT stand for that shit, although their motivations differ.
For SWAT member Rama (Iko Uwais) in The Raid, it's a matter of survival pure and simple. With his team largely decimated by the ambush orchestrated by drug lord Tama in the decrepit tenement he controls via close cicrcuit cameras, intercoms and boy spotters, Rama's raison d'etere isn't so much the apprehension of Tama and his vicious horde as it is to just get the fuck out of there in one piece, and if that means laying the smackdown with his deadly fists and feet of fury and littering corridors with the maimed carcasses of assholes who become obstacles to that objective, then so be it. Evans' and Uwais' second outing after Merantau Warrior is a balls-to-the-walls adrenaline shot to the veins of the most jaded action movie fan. The fight scenes escalate in complexity and brutality culminating in a 2- against-1 scrap, the twist here being that it takes the combined skills of Rama and Brother-Turned-Bad Andi (Donny Alamsyah) to take on Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian, also the movie's co-fight choreographer alongside Uwais), a stone cold fighting machine who likens pulling a trigger to "ordering take out" and can still dispense punishment with shards of a broken fluorescent tube sticking out of his neck! The plot is inconsequential (some tosh about the raid itself being a set up, police corruption, Good Brother vs Bad Brother Bollywood drama blah blah) and the acting purely serviceable (the thespic skills of a Crowe or a Bale isn't required here). The Raid Redemption is carnage served straight up. Neat, 2 cubes and hold the water please.
Tony Jaa's Ong Bak set the bar and standards for a new era of bone-crunching martial arts in 2008. With Jaa supposedly back filming a sequel to Tom Yum Goong after a self-imposed exile following the stresses of shooting Ong Bak 2 and 3, he'd best remember: The bar's now been set even higher.
For Dredd (Karl Urban) - judge, jury and executioner of an urban law enforcement unit called Judges in a futuristic, dystopian concrete jungle called Mega City One-the motivations are even clearer. He's there to take down Ma-Ma (Lena Heady), scarred former hooker, current gang boss and landlord of Peach Tree, a high rise slum doubling as a manufacturing base for Slo-Mo (the current "hot" narcotic on the street, enabling users to view time at 1% of regular speed) and if he has to fill up stairwells with bullet-ridden bodies of minions promised a bounty for his head and that of rookie Mutant Psychic partner Anderson (Olivia Thirlby) on his ascent to the Penthouse Lair of the Drug Queen, then so be it.
Under siege, sealed off from the outside with no chance of back up and facing resistance from seemingly every block dweller, Dredd's response is a simple warning:
"In case you have forgotten, this block operates under the same rules as the rest of the city. Ma-Ma is not the law... I am the law."
Travis' remake rights all the wrongs of the pathetic Sly Stallone attempt in 1995. The screen Dredd is now the closet approximation to his comic book avatar; a stone-cold dispenser of justice, a merciless and remorseless enforcer of the law and most important of all, he NEVER removes the helmet this time, leading Urban to deliver the finest mouth-and-chin based acting since Peter Weller in Robocop. And it's solid R-Rated action all the way, with enough head and body shots to satisfy the most avid gamer, a good chunk of it delivered in glorious slow-motion to approximate the POV of junkies after a shot of Slo-Mo. And I liked the fact that the thankless sidekick/rookie role here is actually a terrific asset to the unstoppable Dredd, her psychic abilities coming in handy when anticipating violence and extracting information from inside the heads of suspects. Apart from a slightly underwhelming climax, Dredd hits all the right notes and unlike the 1995 travesty, this time I can safely say: Bring on the sequel!
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