So it took me a while to get to seeing this movie for the first time, which is weird since I was always going like "This movie looks great and I should see it as soon as I can." I just didn't come up to do so until this Friday when I decided to go to Best Buy for the first time in quite a while, more so looking to see if there was any good anime on bluray for cheap (which wasn't the case this time, so I'll have to rely on the internet and online shopping for that sort of thing) but while I was there, I saw that there were some movies on sale cheap and one of them was The Raid: Redemption for $10 and I was like "Okay, let's finally see what all the praise this movie was getting was about" and I bought it yet didn't watch it until later at night. But when that time came, I kind of have to say that this was one of the best action films I've seen in quite a while. It was really intense and the fight scenes were really well choreographed and shot just as well to make every moment of action just as amazing as the previous one. So it's easy to say that I really enjoyed this movie and it'll probably be on a regular screening in my home when I feel like I'm in the mood for some straight up action. Whether it'll remain being one of the best action films of all time remains to be seen, although I do think that the lack of story might bring down the quality a little but what it lacks in story it more than brings in intensity.
While looking up some information regarding the team behind this, such as it's director Gareth Evans and the actors who do the large amount of the fighting in the movie, it was brought to my attention the one star review that the late Roger Ebert and a follow up article he did in order to defend his opinion on the film called Hollywood's highway to Hell. Now I know that there was more than one person who didn't like this movie or didn't think that the movie was as great as a lot of people thought it was and there will always be times where you can disagree with a person about things like this, I'm just the kind of person who would rather know why someone does or doesn't like something over the fact that they like it or not. So I read the article and for the most part, he did bring up some good points, such as the previously mentioned lack of story and character development which makes most of the characters nothing more than meat puppets to get pummeled on and killed, along with wondering if making a movie that can be generic but amazing at that is more than enough. That little bit brought up how Drive was advertised as a Fast and the Furious clone, which could have been much farther from the truth, leading to a woman to sue the distributors for how misleading the trailer was.
While I agree that Drive is a better movie than The Raid is for sure and he does have a point about how genre film shouldn't mean that it can just rely on just being good at the one aspect and have nothing of substance to back it up, sometimes you just need to be in the mood for something that is just pure action to just have some fun and even today there aren't that many action films that can have some entertaining sequences like The Raid. I could mention how some reviews of his could be hypocritical where he give a movie a negative review and a movie that is similar a positive one but I am not really interested about getting into a tirade about that. All I can say is that not every film has to be the best film that has ever been since what is the fun in that? Also is there even enough talent in film making for that to even be a possibility? Now having taste in film is a picky thing, as there are films that can be similar that each bring their own different feelings of each but there is a limit to how that can be. For example how how Halloween got all of the praise in the world and yet almost every slasher since has been criticized for being just a clone or being incredibly inferior. Yet when I compare the original Halloween to say Friday the 13th Part 2, there really isn't all that much different between the two aside from slightly better cinematography and a catchier soundtrack, yet Halloween 2 tried to be more like the slashers it inspired and didn't do all that well with it. All I can leave on now with this topic is The Raid: Redemption is good at being what it is meant to be: a solid action film. And I'm okay with that.
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