THE RAID: REDEMPTION

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Battle Royale
It's Gettin' Real in the Jakarta Housing Block
By Cole Smithey

Writer/director Gareth Evans's brazenly over-the-top martial arts extravaganza sets a new waterline for what audiences can expect from a genre that never gets old.

Filmed in a gritty cinéma vérité style by ace cinematographer Matt Flannery (“Merantau”), the well-contained martial arts action movie is a non-stop assault of brutal violence delivered with blinding speed. Unlike Hollywood action movies that sugarcoat their body counts, here we really feel it when a character is suddenly dispatched from their mortal coil with extreme prejudice.

The nuts-and-bolts storyline follows an elite special-forces team of 20 SWAT-like Jakarta troops made up of mainly rookies. Their mission is to raid a heavily guarded 15-story apartment block occupied by Tama (Ray Sahetapy). Tama is one very well defended drug kingpin living on the building’s top floor. Tama keeps tabs on the action below from his bank of surveillance monitors.

With no police back up available, the team soon find they have bitten off much more trouble than they can chew. Traitors on both sides of the conflict make undercover moves. Although the plot may sound familiar, nothing feels like a rehash. Every scene is exhilarating, putting the audience in an ideal vantage point for every kick, punch, and kill.

Team-leader replacement Rama (Iko Uwais) is a one-man fighting and killing machine. Uwais’s unmistakable mastery of tonfas, as used against machete-wielding attackers, provides for some truly jaw-dropping scenes. It’s notable that martial arts master Iko Uwais also served as fight choreographer alongside Yayan Ruhian. The film’s painstaking attention to every detail of complex action involved in every frame is truly astonishing.

The corollary precision between camera and stunts carry an instinctive logic. The effect is a physical, visual, and intellectual brainstorm of clear-eyed martial arts violence. Evans smartly gives shape to the unfolding barrage of action sequences by relying on the story’s key aspect, which demands that the diminishing squad of cops must conquer their opponents floor by floor. Bruce Lee famously used the narrative device for his last — unfinished — film “The Game of Death” in which Lee had to overcome attackers from different fighting disciplines on each floor as he worked his way to the top. Here too, several fighting styles are used. Indonesian judo and silat are prominently on display.

“The Raid” represents a new breed of action film. Narrative and spectacle are pressed to their farthest limits in the service of a serious-minded drama. An ever-increasing level of complexity in the film’s abundant fight sequences leads to a couple of climatic battles that are categorically exhilarating. Indeed, the filmmakers’ ability to pace the film’s orgiastic spree of clashes not only gives the audience time to breathe, but also allows for the plot’s necessary escalation of physical difficulty.

For martial arts fans, “The Raid” is required viewing. For everyone else, it's a dynamic action movie that will leave you stunned and amazed.

Rated R. 101 mins.

HAYWIRE

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Slap Happy
Soderbergh Knocks Off Tarantino
By Cole Smithey

Proof positive that Steven Soderbergh can make a shamelessly fluffy action thriller, "Haywire’s” trump card is the estimable abilities of mixed-martial-arts-fighter-turned-actress Gina Carano.

Though the movie is nothing more than a flashy debut showcase for the charismatic Carano to show she can act and kick butt, that's sufficient for much popcorn to be consumed.

Carano plays professional assassin Mallory Kane, on the run from a group of power brokers who set her up for a fall that doesn’t pan out. Told mainly in globetrotting flashbacks, the narrative traces Mallory’s problematic assignment to rescue a Chinese journalist being held in Barcelona.

Fast-moving chase sequences mesh with flying bullets and plenty of hand-to-hand fighting between Mallory and various attackers who tend to underestimate Mallory’s killer instinct. Soderbergh’s camera drinks up stylish scenery in glossy action set pieces. The visual flare makes you want the movie to kick into a missing gear of Tarantino-inflected dialogue; sadly screenwriter Lem Dobbs simply isn’t capable of producing such delights.

Still, there’s plenty of tongue-in-cheek humor inherent in the bone-breaking fights that transpire. A roll call of witty supporting turns from the likes of Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Ewan McGregor, and Michael Fassbender spice up the flavor of the action.

“Haywire” is a chamber piece action movie in which the athletic violence on display comes with kisses. If you don’t expect too much, you’ll be more than satisfied.

There’s a tendency to overestimate Steven Soderbergh’s abilities as a director. Since making an enormous independent splash in 1989 with “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” Soderbergh’s films have swung wildly between peaking hills and sea-level valleys. Stable Hollywood fare (see “Erin Brockovich” and the “Ocean’s” franchise), offbeat personal projects (witness the disaster of “Full Frontal” and the underachieving “Girlfriend Experience”), topical epics (see “Traffic” and “Che”), a daring remake (“Solaris”), and retro Hollywood (his best film “The Good German”) map out a consistently inconsistent career.

Steven Soderbergh has a tendency toward making films that have a compartmentalized and brittle feeling about them. “Contagion” and “The Informant!” are prime examples. While the Atlanta-born filmmaker has threatened to retire from directing in recent years, he maintains a prolific output that puts lesser filmmakers like Alexander Payne to shame. His upcoming films include “Behind the Candelabra,” a Liberace biopic and “Magic Mike,” a comedy about an upstart male stripper played by Channing Tatum.

As the latest addition to Soderbergh’s challenging oeuvre “Haywire” is a minor addition that does little to dispel the sense that the filmmaker suffers from a crisis of commitment. You don’t get the feeling that he made the movie out of any deep-seeded artistic urgency. Rather, “Haywire” seems a flashy little one-off on the way to something else.

If the movie serves its most apparent purpose, to turn the muscular Gina Carano into Hollywood’s latest female action star, then so much the better for movie audiences to relish in her innate ability to charm and surprise. But that still leaves an open-ended question about whether Steven Soderbergh has what it takes to create the filmic masterpiece that his work as a filmmaker seems to point toward. It’s anybody’s guess whether or not he’ll pull it off.

Rated R. 93 mins.

IP MAN 2

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Groupthink doesn't live here, critical thought does.This ad-free website is dedicated to Agnès Varda and to Luis Buñuel. Punk heart still beating.

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Mirroring the Master
Ip Man Sequel is a Knock-Out
By Cole Smithey

The second half of Wilson Yip's enthralling Ip Man biopic ratchets up its martial arts fight sequences with phenomenal duels that put you on the edge of your seat.

The political exigencies of the wartime Japanese occupation that came to dominate Ip Man's family life in his hometown of Foshan, China shift to Hong Kong, then a British colony. In order to teach his Wing Chun style of martial arts, Ip Man must first establish himself against Hong Kong's local kung fu masters.

Fighting atop an unanchored table amid a sea of upturned stools, Ip Man practices his craft with a calm fierceness that belies the blinding speed of his hands and feet. Donnie Yen is positively sublime in the role. Renowned martial arts choreographer Sammo Hung admirably fulfills the role of Master Hung, a kung fu master every bit as gifted as Ip Man.

"Ip Man 2" comes to revel in a heavily pronounced Chinese nationalist theme when a Western-style boxer who goes by Taylor "the Twister" Milos (Darren Shahlavi) publicly insults Chinese boxing. It's been a very long time since a filmmaker has upped the stakes on what audiences can and should expect from a martial arts film. You will not be disappointed.

There is a marked shift from the first film's tone of political oppression toward a more dynamic celebration of Ip Man's mastery of Wing Chun kung fu. The fusillade of blinding punches Donnie Yen executes sounds like a drum roll when Ip Man slips into overdrive during flashy moments of hand-to-hand combat. Doubtless, Wing Chun schools around the globe are enjoying an upsurge in enrollment as an indication of the two films.

With little money and a pregnant wife (Lynn Hung), Ip Man rents a rooftop where he plans to teach martial arts. Naturally, every would-be student is a street punk whom the unassuming master must defeat before they will put any stock in him as their sifu (master). Ip Man's first student, Leung (Pierre Ngo), invites a band of friends who take their lessons seriously, perhaps too seriously.

An impromptu fight with local thugs lands Leung in Dutch as a hostage that Ip Man must rescue from a watery fish market holding-bin guarded by a butcher-knife wielding gang. The tense situation allows for a crowded kung fu action sequence where Ip Man and his keen student prove their effectiveness against a large group of attackers. Extracting a pair of knives, Ip Man reverses the blades so as to not cut his enemy. Instead, he uses the deadly weapons to batter his rivals into submission. This evidence of the master's restraint is indicative of the modesty Ip Man exerts when he later thanks the two local martial arts masters he defeats for "letting him win." His respectful behavior also flies in the face of Master Hung, who acts as an extortionist for Wallace (Charles Mayer), the racist expatriate police chief who attempts to control the outspoken local press when he isn't lining his pockets with currency he can't stand the smell of.

As a biopic, Wilson Yip's treatment of Ip Man's cult of personality is tilted toward a Chinese self-identity that honors humility. Ip Man's documented troubles with opium addiction are never addressed. His recovery from a gunshot wound he suffered at the end of the first film is given only cursory attention in an opening credit sequence flashback. It's certain that the screenwriters took innumerable narrative liberties in transposing Ip Man's life to the big screen.

The Ip Man films stand up better as martial arts spectacle movies than they do as biographical records. Whether or not Ip Man was ever made to test his skills against Hong Kong kung fu masters seems uncertain. It's even less persuasive that he was ever called upon to publicly represent the identity of Eastern martial arts against Western boxing in such a crass environment as a boxing ring against such a cartoonish circus-styled opponent as "the Twister."

Regardless of their revisionist history brush strokes, the Ip Man films have merit as thoroughly entertaining martial arts movies. They represent an attention to discipline and humanitarian ethics that should never be forgotten.

 Rated R. 108 mins.