![]() You’re not watching The Raid: Redemption to dig into characters’ relationships or decipher complex histories. It hardly matters that you can guess at who’s going to die and who’s allied with whom - and who will betray those same alliances. ![]() And with that bad news, the situation deteriorates yet again: Tama promises tenants lifelong free rent for killing the invaders, and these tenants emerge from their apartments with guns and machetes and very mean faces, the fates of the cops are all but sealed. Asked “Who else knows we’re here?”, Wahyu doesn’t have an answer: he hasn’t informed his superiors what he’s up to. Listening to the gunfire and explosions in other parts of the building, cops crouched in shadows begin to look around at one another. The bad guys are more than prepared for the raid, pummeling the invaders with what seems monumental firepower. The plan pretty much immediately implodes when the inevitable surveillance cameras reveal their whereabouts. For a minute, they remain undetected, making their way toward a drug lab where they think they’ll find a hostage and gain access to Tama. Wahyu (Pierre Gruno), enter the premises. And by the way, they might keep their eyes open for Tama’s significantly named enforcer Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian) and his equally dangerous tactician Andi (Doni Alamsyah). Their target is the brutal crime boss Tama (Ray Sahetapy), “something of a legend in the underworld,” and his building has been a “no-go zone for police.” While it might occur to you to wonder - and know - why the raid is ordered now, the cops themselves plunge ahead, apparently oblivious to the corruption in their midst. Following his early morning rituals, Rama and his team ride over to the building in a police van, weapons ready and jaws set. At the same Rama’s faith makes him like and unlike those American action-movie cops who keep Bibles on their night tables: he’s introduced with a sign of where he’s from, a sign that shapes your understanding of the grand heroics he’s about to perform. Rama’s Muslim faith is incidental to the plot of The Raid: Redemption ( Serbuan maut), which focuses intently on the pow-pow combat between his Jakarta SWAT team and the horde of craven killers they unearth during a raid on a 15-story apartment building. He kisses his pretty pregnant wife goodbye. As rookie police officer Rama (Iko Uwais) prepares for his day, he goes through the usual action-movie-montagey steps: he does pull-ups, hits a heavy bag, and practices the precise moves of the Indonesian martial arts style pencak silat. And so Rama begins a new odyssey of violence, a journey that will force him to set aside his own life and history and take on a new identity as the violent offender "Yuda." In prison he must gain the confidence of Uco - the son of a prominent gang kingpin - to join the gang himself, laying his own life on the line in a desperate all-or-nothing gambit to bring the whole rotten enterprise to an end.It’s early morning. His family at risk, Rama has only one choice to protect his infant son and wife: He must go undercover to enter the criminal underworld himself and climb through the hierarchy of competing forces until it leads him to the corrupt politicians and police pulling the strings at the top of the heap. ![]() And his triumph over the small fry has attracted the attention of the predators farther up the food chain. Formidable though they may have been, Rama's opponents in that fateful building were nothing more than small fish swimming in a pond much larger than he ever dreamed possible. After fighting his way out of a building filled with gangsters and madmen - a fight that left the bodies of police and gangsters alike piled in the halls - rookie Jakarta cop Rama thought it was done and he could resume a normal life.
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