Film / The Raid

aka: The Raid Redemption

And 100 minutes of awesomeness.

"Good morning, everyone. You may have noticed we have some guests trawling the halls today. Now, I certainly did not invite them and they most certainly are not welcome. So, in the interests of public health, should you rid this building of its recent infestation, well, then, you can consider yourself a permanent resident of this building. Free of charge. You'll find these fucking cockroaches on the sixth floor. Now, go to work. And please, please enjoy yourself."

— Tama's villainous rousing speech, which handily explains the movie's premise

Serbuan Maut (Deadly Assault or Death Raid), known as The Raid: Redemption in English-speaking countries, is a 2011 Indonesian martial arts action film written, directed and edited by Gareth Evans. The movie stars martial artist Iko Uwais in the leading role, making this his second team-up with Evans (the first being Merantau).

Deep in the heart of Jakarta's slums sits what appears to be a derelict apartment building — but is, in reality, a well-guarded and well-armed safe house for some of the world's most dangerous criminals. Though the run-down apartment block is considered untouchable to even the bravest of police, on one rainy morning, an elite strike team rolls out with a single order: raid the building and take down the notorious drug lord who runs it.

All goes according to plan at first, but when a chance encounter with a spotter blows their cover and news of their assault reaches the drug lord, the building's lights go out and the "tenants" cut off all the exits. Stranded on the 6th floor with no way out, the strike team must fight their way through the city's worst criminals to carry out their mission...or at least survive long enough to find a way out.

A sequel, The Raid 2: Berandal, was released worldwide on 28 March 2014. An American remake bringing back Evans as producer and Yayan Ruhian (Mad Dog) and Uwais as fight choreographers has been announced, but is currently on hold.

A graphic novel based on the film was published in Indonesia in 2012. In 2016, it was announced that Titan Comics had partnered with Evans and XYZ Films (one of the film's production companies) to create a comic book Spin-Off series that expands on characters from both films with original stories. The series, consisting of four volumes, was released in 2018.

No connection to the 1954 western of the same name

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The Raid contains examples of:

• Artistic License – Martial Arts : While the movie features a lot of fighters who do amazing moves (including Rama, Andi, and Mad Dog), many of the moves are also flashy and unnecessary.
• Aerith and Bob: Tama's two henchmen, Mad Dog and Andi. The former has a crazy nickname, and the other has a given name that sounds like a common Anglo-Saxon homologue.
• Ambiguously Evil: Lieutenant Wahyu clearly knows more than he's telling about what's going on, to the point where it jeopardizes the mission when Jaka and the team learn that they're there unauthorized, and no one can help them. When the fighting heats up, he's seen cowering, but by the time he's cornered with the team, he's blasting away with everyone else, and throws down with Rama and Dagu when he has to. Whether he's a Cowboy Cop or a Dirty Cop is questioned, and his scenes of retrospection could be cause for regret, but they aren't. Wahyu makes his intentions unambiguously clear when he murders Dagu, and reveals himself as a cowardly opportunist.
• An Aesop:
  • An unusual one. The theme of both seems to boil down to "Sometimes bad people will want to kill you, and you'll have to use everything you have to come out on top and avoid being another victim in a sea of victims."
  • More specifically, the theme of the first one seems to be about finding redemption (hence the title), and the second one is about the toll fighting corruption takes on you.
• Anyone Can Die: You know the story is going to be like this when most of the SWAT cops are killed in the opening shootout. At the end of the movie, only Lt. Wahyu, Rama, Andi and Bowo survive the raid.
• Armor Is Useless: Justified in that the SWAT team vests are simple "crossdraw" style vests, meant to carry magazines and tools, rather than provide any real protection. The vests would be worn OVER a flak vest or plate carrier (which the police curiously aren't wearing) if protection was needed. They still stop the occasional slash, and since silat involves heavy use of knees and elbows, Rama's pads come in very handy.
• Ax-Crazy:
  • Mad Dog.
  • The machete gang leader also counts as one, judging by his quote:
  "Kalau saya muak, saya menggila!" (English translation: "When I'm pissed off, I'll go apeshit!")
• Back-to-Back Badasses: Rama and Andi against Mad Dog.
• "Back to Camera" Pose: The film's poster has Rama standing with his back to the viewer, looking at the heavily-guarded apartment block that his team is tasked to raid.
• Baddie Flattery: Zigzagged, after Andi is outed as a traitor, Tama Riyadi expresses disappointment in the discovery, going as far as to say he liked Andi. This occurring right before he orders Mad Dog to torture him.
• Because I'm Good At It: Andi's reason for staying with the crime syndicate: he thinks it's the only thing he's ever been good at.
• Becoming the Mask: Andi infiltrated the crime syndicate, but decided that he was good at it and became a real gangster. He still has loyalty to his brother, however.
• Berserk Button: Don't mess with Jaka for anything that comes to his men, like prevent him from searching for Bowo and Rama. Wahyu learned this one the hard way.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Rama is normally a kind and gentle man, but he will seriously kick your ass in a fight.
• Big Bad: Tama, the drug lord that controls the apartment.
• Big Brother Instinct: Andi to Rama. Even after disappearing for a long time, Andi still cares enough for Rama, his younger brother, to betray his boss so he can save Rama.
• Big Good: While The Hero of the story is Rama, it's Jaka who leads the raid and the only of them who can hold his own against Mad Dog in a one-on-one fight, albeit for a time.
• Bittersweet Ending: Tama, Mad Dog and most of their goons are dead, the corrupt Lieutenant Wahyu has been arrested, and Rama has saved both Bowo and Andi. However, Jaka and all but two of his squad are dead, and Andi chooses to stay behind and restart the crime syndicate under his command.
• Blade Enthusiast: Rama favours the special forces T-BAR, and uses it in conjunction with a nightstick and his silat expertise on a corridor of mooks to gruesome effect. Most of the mooks make use of pig-stickers, but prominent among them are the gang who exclusively use massive machetes.
• Blood Knight: Mad Dog, who gets no pleasure from shooting people, but really enjoys beating them to death with his bare hands. Twice he handicaps himself when he has an advantage to provide his enemies a fighting chance. He seems to get an almost sexual pleasure from hurting people, as evidenced when he kills Jaka.
• Bludgeoned to Death: Tama's Establishing Character Moment. See below.
• Book Ends: A pistol runs out of bullets near the beginning and end of the film. The consequences are different.
• Break Them by Talking: Tama's Hannibal Lecture to Wahyu near the end was enough to cause Wahyu to give up on bringing Tama to justice and simply murder him, after which he tries to shoot himself.
• The Brute: Mad Dog.
• Call-Back: Mad Dog kills Jaka with a neck snap earlier in the film and is about to use to same move to kill a badly beaten Rama, but is interrupted by Andi stabbing him from behind with a broken strip light.
• Chairman of the Brawl: Wahyu attacks a mook with a chair during the drug lab fight.
• Chekhov's Skill: Rama's martial arts practice in the opening scene features a flurry of close punches as a finishing move. Guess what he uses to finish off Mad Dog?
• Chromosome Casting: Both villains and policemen are all men. There are exactly two women in this movie.
• Co-Dragons: Mad Dog, who doubles as The Brute, and Andi, who doubles as The Evil Genius.
• Cold Sniper: The two snipers who take out the SWAT's perimeter guard. They even wound one of the guards, and use his screaming to find other SWAT officers and calmly pick them off.
• Combat Pragmatist: Both the SWAT team and the goons believe in this. The one exception is Mad Dog; see Blood Knight above.
• Covers Always Lie:
  • The UK DVD cover◊ modified the original cover/poster, adding helicopters and multiple explosions on the outside of the building. Only one explosion happens in the movie, and no helicopters appear in the film at all. This is really odd because when the movie was first released in theaters internationally, they all used the same original poster◊.
  • Additionally, most versions of the cover play up the "20 Elite Cops, 30 Floors of Hell" tagline. The truth is that most of the cops are undertrained rookies, their numbers are reduced to a handful pretty early on, and the building in question only goes up to floor 15 (as seen in a wide shot when the team is approaching).
• Cowboy Cop: The whole SWAT team becomes this after they've been spotted; Rama stands out particularly. If he's not beating bad guys to a pulp, he either stabs them or slashes their legs or throats. Considering the fact that they're stuck in hostile territory with no way out and no chance of rescue, it's more justified than usual.
• Darkened Building Shootout: The initial gunfight of the film takes place after Tama cuts the power in the building.
• Day in the Limelight: The movie is almost all Silat fighting, but Dagu, the cop accompanying Lt. Wahyu, gets a few good shots in the drug lab fight to show off some serious Taekwondo, contrasting the rapid blow styles of all the other martial artists with excellent technical form in heavy pivoting strikes that lay waste to just as many mooks as Rama's style.
• Destination Defenestration: Several times, one of them consisting of Rama throwing himself (and the leader of the machete gang) out of a window.
• Determinator: Rama and, to an even greater extent, Mad Dog. The small inconvenience of a six-inch long fluorescent light being jammed into his neck only makes Mad Dog fight harder.
• "Die Hard" on an X: Die Hard in a derelict apartment building with the invading force being the protagonists.
• Dirty Cop: Lieutenant Wahyu turns out to be one.
• Doesn't Like Guns: Mad Dog. He explicitly explains this to Jaka; he says it takes away the "rush" that comes with fist-fights (or in Indonesian, ("Nggak ada gregetnya"), and complains that shooting a gun is "like ordering fucking takeout".
• Dreadlock Warrior: One of the machete-wielding gangsters rocks some nice dreads. He manages to hold his own better than most of the machete gangsters, and he's the only one to not get a fatal takedown.
• Dressing as the Enemy: Defied. The SWAT guys could simply swap clothes with some of their defeated foes in order to blend in with the random residents and slip away rather than fight through hordes of them, but they never do. Rama openly refuses to do so, saying his police clothes "fit better."
• Dirty Coward: The Lieutenant, who spends most of the opening firefight trying to avoid both the bullets and wetting himself with fear, and later goes as far as killing one of his own men as part of his escape plan.
• Driven to Suicide: Lieutenant Wahyu; unfortunately for him, he ran out of bullets.
• Elite Mooks: The machete gang manage to give Rama a good fight.
• Establishing Character Moment:
  • Rama starts the film in a montage of prayer, exercise, and saying goodbye to his pregnant wife, establishing him as a likable badass and stoic.
  • Tama starts the film by shooting a group of hostages in the back of the head. Running out of bullets when moving to shoot the last one, he decides to pick up a hammer from a drawer to do the deed, rather than the bullets surrounding it.
  • Jaka establishes himself as a total hard-ass in his opening monologue, but also demonstrates his basic decency by letting the innocent bystander bring his medicine to his sick wife, on the condition that Rama "stick to him like fucking glue."
  • Mad Dog and Andi are described before we really meet them, so it's entirely possible for a first-time viewer not to be sure which is which for a long time — especially since Mad Dog is so small that you wouldn't expect him to be the tough and scary one, and since Andi's establishing character moment is him violently attacking his fellow gangsters.
• Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Just about everyone in the complex seems to have silat fighting moves. Dagu subverts this with his taekwondo skills, although most people in the audience could easily miss the distinction, and Jaka uses Judo throws and groundfighting.
• Evil All Along: The Lieutenant was corrupt all along, and as the film goes along, we see him for the cowardly backstabber he really is.
• Evil Genius: Andi manages Tama's criminal enterprise.
• Excuse Plot: The actual story is pretty good, but it's very simple and pared down to its bare bones in terms of how much screentime is devoted to exposition. And frankly, you could work out a very good approximation of the story on your own if you watched the film without subtitles.
• Eye Scream: One of the police gets shot through the eye.
• Face–Heel Turn: The Lieutenant, more or less.
• Faux Affably Evil: Tama. In his Establishing Character Moment, he "politely" asks one of the captives he his murdering to look after his very empty gun (they're tied up, so they can't do anything back) and wait for him to get back, then beats him to death with a hammer when he could have granted him a quicker death by reloading. He also comes across as relatively courteous while telling the gangsters to brutally murder the SWAT team.
• Finishing Move: Mad Dog likes to deliver a Neck Snap to finished opponents.
• Funny Background Event: During the drug lab fight (specifically Dagu's last segment), a goon can be seen hastily bagging a bunch of cash from a table and running away.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: Lt. Wahyu uses a "brawler" style, with heavy use of improvised weapons. He's also bigger and taller than most of the mooks he fights, and he certainly uses it.
• Guns Are Worthless: Averted; despite the focus (of the movie) on martial arts and knife fighting, guns are still the most lethal weapons around.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The corrupt authorities who ordered the mission and warned Tama. Reza is named dropped, but it's implied that there are others. This is fleshed out a bit, naturally, in The Raid 2: Berandal, although Reza remains a background figure even there.
• Heel–Face Turn: Andi, who kills a couple of his own men to get to and try and save Rama. He later teams up with his brother against Mad Dog.
• Hallway Fight: The main characters have to take down an entire apartment building full of gangsters, which leads to plenty hallway fights. One of the main fights involves them slashing their way through bad guys with machetes.
• Hell Hotel: The apartment building is basically a flop house under the protection of a crimelord.
• Heroes Fight Barehanded: Inverted: Not only do the officers have zero problems using guns, knives and batons, but antagonist Mad Dog puts down his pistol so he can fight Jaka fairly.
• Hollywood Silencer: Averted; the police all put silencers on their guns because it's a stealth mission but the guns are still pretty loud.
• Homage: Naming The Dragon "Mad Dog" is likely a reference to Hard Boiled.
• Impaled Palm: After Tama finds out about Andi's treachery, he pins his hand to a table with a knife.
• Impromptu Fortress: The film is about police tactical team trying to infiltrate a derelict apartment building that has been made into a fortress by a gang of criminals.
• Improvised Weapon:
  • A small LPG tank put inside a fridge makes a good directional explosive.
  • Rama kills one of the Machete Gang with a broken doorframe. Now in GIF form for your viewing pleasure!◊
  • Andi uses a broken fluorescent light tube against Mad Dog, and Rama finishes him off with it.
  • In the meth lab, Lt. Wahyu beats a mook down with a chair and drops a metal locker cabinet on another.
• Informed Ability: For a supposedly elite squad of police officers, the vast majority of the group goes down very easily within the first part of the movie. Only a handful of them turn out to be hardened, capable aces.

• Jitter Cam: Frequently, to reflect the chaos and disorientation of the situation the police find themselves in.
• Just Hit Him: Zigzagged. Strikes and throws are both used to effect with neither being automatically better or worse, as some characters show a proficient falling technique, and most of them are preternaturally tough to hits.
• Karma Houdini: As far as we know, the Cold Sniper duo get away scot free, though in fairness they were firing from an adjacent building.
• Kiai: Almost eery single punch and kick comes with a flood of kiais.
• Kick the Dog: The first scene with Tama, in which he murders several prisoners, the last with needless additional brutality compared to the others. Also an Establishing Character Moment.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After the Lieutenant murders Dagu and tries bargaining his way out of the situation with Tama, he's told by Tama that he'll never escape anyway and will just be murdered, causing him to snap and kill Tama before trying to commit suicide. He's out of bullets because he tried shooting at Rama, and he ends up being dragged away and brought to justice, with solid evidence to prove his part in the corruption of the police.
• Let's Fight Like Gentlemen: Mad Dog really believes in this. Abandoning his gun for a fight (against Jaka) is one thing. But against Rama, he allows him time to unchain, untie and even bandage Andi's hands before commencing fisticuffs.
• Machete Mayhem: One criminal has a machete hidden under his dining table, and several others appear to be holding them when gunned down. A roving group of thugs is armed exclusively with machetes.
• Made of Iron: Andi, Rama and Mad Dog. Andi gets his hand impaled and his body used as a punching bag, and Rama fights through countless hordes of criminals, but they're both in fighting shape for the final brawl. Mad Dog goes through one epic fight with the sergeant, yet he's still prime to get double-teamed. He does not lose slightly the advantage until he gets stabbed in the neck, and even so, he keeps fighting on.
• Mauve Shirt: Bowo and Dagu are the only other two cops besides Rama and Jaka to survive the initial massacre of the SWAT team and gain any characterization. Bowo is sidelined from much of the action because of grievous injuries he sustained in the attack, and Dagu assists Rama in the narcotics lab fight before he's betrayed and shot by Wahyu.
• Meaningful Name: Rama.
• Moe Greene Special: A sniper kills one of the SWAT officers this way when Tama is alerted to the raid.
• More Dakka: The start of the film, when both sides are using large numbers of assault rifles. The gun violence gets much more spare as people run out of ammo.
• Muzzle Flashlight: Exploited during the initial firefight- a SWAT officer fires a shotgun into an opening, giving their position away to a nearby patrol of gangsters.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Mad Dog. Mad. Dog. He is not a very nice man.
• Neck Snap: Mad Dog's Finishing Move, performed successfully on Jaka and unsuccessfully on Rama.
• New Meat: Most of the SWAT team are newbies, with the exception of Sergeant Jaka.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Fist Fight: One good guy. Four machete-armed bad guys. Good guy wins. Enforced, oddly: Rama loses his knife and nightstick early in the movie, and doesn't retrieve them immediately because he needs to hide. Later, however, he literally walks on his nightstick as he leaves, but doesn't take a moment to rearm (nor does anyone else through the rest of the movie, really).
• Nice Guy:
  • Rama, who is portrayed as generally kind and not prone to needless wanton violence.
  • The apartment resident who has a sick wife also counts as one; he gives shelter to Rama (albeit reluctantly) and does not appear to have any real connection or resemblance to the rest of the building's inhabitants.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Mad Dog delivers one to Andi after his betrayal is revealed.
• Noble Demon: Mad Dog, though noble could be stretching a bit the meaning of the word. See the Let's Fight Like Gentlemen entry. The result he is a fan favorite character.
• Oh, Crap!: Jaka has this reaction twice in quick succession early on - first when the lookout alerts upstairs that the police have arrived, and second when Wahyu reveals the raid was not officially sanctioned, meaning the squad is alone and unsupported.
• One-Man Army: Rama single-handedly provides most of the body count for his side. There are some scenes when one wonders if he could have done the whole freaking mission by himself.
• Overdrawn at the Blood Bank:
  • Rama at the end of the second film. The final fight leaves him with enough cuts to chop a tree down, and he still has the strength to kill three men in the next room afterwards.
• Pet the Dog: The opening scene of Rama praying and saying goodbye to his pregnant wife establishes him right away as a good guy.
  • Mad Dog gets one, before he fights Rama, he gives him a chance to have a moment with his brother and even bandage his wound.
• Pintsized Powerhouse:
  • Mad Dog is smaller than most of the cast, yet he's Tama's enforcer. He's a highly skilled martial artist and clearly tougher than any of the other characters, even though he's prone to being frequently picked up and thrown around. He defeats and kills Jaka, who is about twice his size, and it takes the combined efforts of both Rama and Andi to kill him. Even then, he completely dominates the fight and only begins to falter once Andi manages to stab him in the neck from behind.
  • Rama's not the biggest guy either, especially in comparison to the rest of the force, but he basically completes the raid alone.
  • Dagu's about the same size as Rama, and in many of his own fights he's seen lifting and flipping opponents bigger than him. It takes him, Rama, and Agee to move the fridge, but when Agee's killed and Rama starts shooting, Dagu continues pushing the thing into place by himself.
• Pop-Star Composer: The soundtrack for the English-language release was co-written by Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda (along with Joseph Trapanese, who arranged and orchestrated Daft Punk's score on TRON: Legacy).
• Pressure Point: Dagu uses one against the side of a mook's neck.
• Rasputinian Death: Mad Dog is on the receiving end of one at the hands of Rama and Andi. Even after getting stabbed deep in the neck with a shard of tube lighting and his spine and both arms broken, he's still fighting until his throat is finally slashed open. Not to mention that before that fight even started he'd been in a several-minute-long brawl with Jaka and still kept going.
• Rated M for Manly: It's an hour and a half of martial artists beating the ever-loving tar out of each other with barely a pause for breath, so this goes without saying.
• Real Men Love Jesus: Rama's Establishing Character Moment shows him to be an observant Muslim.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Bowo and Rama respectively. Even established when the former is aggressive towards a man getting medicine to his wife until the latter makes him back off.
  • Also with Andi and Rama. Of the brothers, the former is a reckless criminal and the latter is a by-the-book officer.
• Rule of Cool: There is pretty much no good reason for Rama to fight a mook entirely on top of a long stretch of tables, but damn if it doesn't look cool.
• Sacrificial Lion: Jaka, who dies two thirds of the way through the film at the hands of Mad Dog.
• Screaming Warrior: Every fighter in all fight scenes screams on the top of their lungs when trying to kill each other.
• Sequel Hook: The movie ends with Andi taking over the Tama's crime syndicate but the corrupt forces that sent Lt. Wahyu still out there, setting the stage for the sequel, The Raid 2: Berandal.
• Sergeant Rock: Sergeant Jaka.
• Shell-Shock Silence: Happens when Bowo gets shot in the ear.
• Sibling Team: Rama and Andi, taking down Mad Dog together.
• Steel Eardrums: While at the beginning of the movie the SWAT team uses silenced assault rifles (which are realistically still pretty loud), the gangsters use Kalashnikovs in an enclosed, echoing central hallway with seemingly no hearing loss (though they die quickly enough so it is possible that they did lose hearing, it just wasn't shown). On the other hand, when Rama stands literally right next to an exploding fridge (see Improvised Weapon above) he has zero hearing problems. The only time someone is shown having hearing problems is a guy whose ear is completely shot off (see Shell-Shock Silence above).
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • Jaka's signature kill. 3 point-blank headshot while holding the target's head. A badly-wounded Bowo does the same thing to a guy during the corridor fight.
  • When the residents attack the cops in the van, they open up on full-auto and just keep firing. Justified to an extent, as they're trying to disable the van itself, and not just kill the cops.
• Thicker Than Water: Andi betrays Tama because one of the characters is his brother.
• Trailers Always Lie: The trailers make it seem like all 20 cops will be present for fighting their way through the building; in the movie, most die within minutes of screen time.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: During the intro, Rama and Jaka both lead their own squads, and the plot then alternates between said squads when they are separated.
• The Worf Effect: Mostly due to his defensively superior fighting style, Jaka is able to fight Mad Dog more successfully than either Rama or Andi could alone or together, but is still dominated and killed by him to establish him as the biggest threat in the film.
• Uriah Gambit: The movie's plot is essentially this; the purpose of the hit on Tama was to kill the lieutenant who had outlived his usefulness by forcing him to try to pull off a seemingly impossible hit.
• Wham Line: Near the end Tama delivers one to Lieutenant Wahyu, which reveals the titular raid to have been a Uriah Gambit to get rid of the lieutenant.
  Tama: You don't get it, you're already dead.You've been dead since I got the call from Reza.
• World of Badass: The hotel is bursting with badass gangsters, and most of the surviving SWAT members count as badass too.
• Would Hurt a Child: There are several kids working as spotters for the apartment complex. The lieutenant is perfectly willing to kill them to keep the element of surprise, to the outrage of Jaka.
• Wrestler in All of Us:
  • Mad Dog uses a swinging neckbreaker against Jaka before finishing him off.
  • The machete gang leader tries a powerbomb on Rama.
  • Dagu uses a chokeslam onto a table in one of the mooks.
  • Rama uses a facebuster variation on one of the machete gang onto a broken doorframe. Ouch.
• Wretched Hive: The apartment.
• Villain by Default: The building residents, with very few exceptions. Most of them are gang members and killers in hiding from police, authorities, or rival syndicates.
• Villainous Valour: Mad Dog voluntarily disarms himself for a fairer fight with Jaka and releases Andi from chains so he can take him and Rama on at the same time. He then fights both Andi and Rama to a standstill, even after the fight with Jaka.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness:
  • The entire point of the mission was so the villains could get rid of the corrupt Lieutenant, who was no longer of use to them.
  • Lieutenant Wahyu himself also kills Dagu after Dagu handcuffs Tama.

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