Evans: Serbuan Maut (The Raid) (2011)

The second collaboration between Welsh director Gareth Evans and Indonesian martial arts expert Iko Uwei is disarmingly simple in its premise: an elite SWAT team attempts to take down an apartment complex run by an arch-criminal, only to find themselves trapped on the sixth floor, at which point they have to fight their way out. For the most part, the film’s synonymous with the fact of the building itself – there’s hardly any character, dialogue or exposition – giving it the intense material presence of certain video game environments and backdrops. However, whereas contemporary films often take their cues from contemporary games – especially sandbox and open-world games – Evans’ interminable, confined spaces reach back to the earliest first-person shooters. Released at the cusp between third and fourth console generations, these games charted 3D spaces that were still suffused with the 2D claustrophobia of previous platformers – and the film feels particularly indebted to such monochromatic trailblazers as Doom and Quake in its endless recession of corridors, stairwells and lift shafts, with tension building around doorways and corners. As with those titles, it takes suspense to differentiate space, which all looks similar from a distance, but starts to register minor, local contours under the unbearable, crushing imperative to find an exit. And, just as those games were quite classically cinematic in their sense of space and time – it’s no coincidence that this was the great age of game ‘sequels’ to film franchises – so there’s something quaint about the film’s sense of suspense; it’s like playing a video game based on a film rather than watching a film based on a video game. In that sense, it reaches back to a brief moment when it felt as if video games might merely complete films, rather than eclipsing them – it’s how, say, Alien: Resurrection might have looked if it had taken the various Alien games as serious filmic precedents. And by incorporating that moment, Evans creates a live action film that plays to a digital, gaming-oriented mileu without sacrificing one scrap of its blistering heat: although the fighting’s real, and conducted by professional martial artists, all the bodies feel generated by the camera in a way that fighters such as Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and even Tony Jaa are not. Perhaps that’s why the violence dissolves into the texture of the film even as it approaches ever greater pitches of extremity and ingenuity, until every object quivers to be repurposed as a weapon, and every surface shimmers with corrosive, liquid violence.