I had never heard of this film until I saw numerous people accusing Dredd of being a ripoff of this. So I have been looking into it for months and watching it, I can see why people say that, but the two films are quite different. I won't be going into these differences in this post, though I want to on another post.
So I had some "technical issues" when I first put it in. The film starts off in Indonesian, for no reason. I guess authenticity, but if you're going to make a foreign film, don't call name it something English. Thankfully, you can opt for an English dub, but naturally the voices aren't synchronized if you do go for the dub. And even when I got the voices in English, I couldn't get the subtitles off for some reason. And the subtitles don't even correlate with the dub. Anyways, at least everything makes sense in English, even if it comes across as mildly barbaric.
The first 30 or so minutes are pretty boring and monotonous, with action being "two guys sitting behind cover while spraying bullets", which isn't very fun to watch. There's a way to have gunfights in films feel fun and bombastic. Look at Kingsman, or Equilibrium, which have incredible gunfights. This film doesn't do anything like that with its gunfights, making them feel boring, if incredibly chaotic as the film has outright brutal deaths and has no quarrel with filling the screen with people. Around the 30 minute mark, the film starts turning into a martial arts film. The fights here are very well choreographed and acted, though the camera goes on acid during these fight scenes. These fights are pretty bombastic, if illogical, with one guy, no joking, continuing his fight with two other guys after getting impaled in the neck by a wooden stake like it was nothing.
The plot is simplistic, like Dredd, but nowhere near as satisfying and a lot of the major plot points are nonsensical, like there's a cop in the film who kills one of his fellow cops towards the end for no reason leaving you in a dumbfounding moment. The characters are faceless if anything. It's pretty easy to confuse like five of the cops for each other as they all look and act the same. The villains are worse, with no character or development throughout that isn't completely predictable (nothing like Dredd by the way). The ending is uneventful, and acts as you would expect for the most part (except when it bases logic on nonsense).
At the end of the day, this is no amazing film. It's derivative, if pretty decent after the 30 minute mark. It has its "oohhaho!" moments, but at the end of the day, it's just another eh action film. As always, I recommend Kingsman or Equilibrium instead because they do action better than most action films in recent memory. The Raid: Redemption gets a 6.5/10.
So I had some "technical issues" when I first put it in. The film starts off in Indonesian, for no reason. I guess authenticity, but if you're going to make a foreign film, don't call name it something English. Thankfully, you can opt for an English dub, but naturally the voices aren't synchronized if you do go for the dub. And even when I got the voices in English, I couldn't get the subtitles off for some reason. And the subtitles don't even correlate with the dub. Anyways, at least everything makes sense in English, even if it comes across as mildly barbaric.
The first 30 or so minutes are pretty boring and monotonous, with action being "two guys sitting behind cover while spraying bullets", which isn't very fun to watch. There's a way to have gunfights in films feel fun and bombastic. Look at Kingsman, or Equilibrium, which have incredible gunfights. This film doesn't do anything like that with its gunfights, making them feel boring, if incredibly chaotic as the film has outright brutal deaths and has no quarrel with filling the screen with people. Around the 30 minute mark, the film starts turning into a martial arts film. The fights here are very well choreographed and acted, though the camera goes on acid during these fight scenes. These fights are pretty bombastic, if illogical, with one guy, no joking, continuing his fight with two other guys after getting impaled in the neck by a wooden stake like it was nothing.
The plot is simplistic, like Dredd, but nowhere near as satisfying and a lot of the major plot points are nonsensical, like there's a cop in the film who kills one of his fellow cops towards the end for no reason leaving you in a dumbfounding moment. The characters are faceless if anything. It's pretty easy to confuse like five of the cops for each other as they all look and act the same. The villains are worse, with no character or development throughout that isn't completely predictable (nothing like Dredd by the way). The ending is uneventful, and acts as you would expect for the most part (except when it bases logic on nonsense).
At the end of the day, this is no amazing film. It's derivative, if pretty decent after the 30 minute mark. It has its "oohhaho!" moments, but at the end of the day, it's just another eh action film. As always, I recommend Kingsman or Equilibrium instead because they do action better than most action films in recent memory. The Raid: Redemption gets a 6.5/10.