This summer, MovieJawn is counting down our 25 favorite action movies of all time! We will be posting a new entry each day! See the whole list so far here.

by Nikk Nelson, Staff Writer

I got better friends in college. Or, maybe I should say, friends who not only shared my tastes, but encouraged them. My buddy Sean did more to open my eyes to what good music was than anyone else I’ve ever met in my life. He’s the reason I discovered artists like A Tribe Called Quest, Songs: Ohia, Built to Spill, and The Murder City Devils. So, in turn, I shared my film knowledge and every once in a while, Sean would call me about movies we had to go see at Liberty Hall in downtown Lawrence, Kansas. We had recently had a conversation wherein I bemoaned how I felt like most American action/martial arts movies produced in the last few years were all just poor imitations of The Matrix and was eager to see something new and fresh. The first cure to that Sean put on my radar was Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior with Tony Jaa. It had been so long since I had seen someone like Tony Jaa. I thought it would be another lifetime before I saw their like again. 

Less than a decade later, Sean called me again and said, “Dude, you have got to see this flick called The Raid.” Admittedly, I didn’t take Sean as seriously as I usually did. By 2011, I was tired of being disappointed by mainstream action movies, nothing was speaking to me, everything was already on a trend of rehashes, sequels, and remakes. So, I waited for The Raid to come out on DVD and rented it. I watched it and then immediately bought a physical copy. All due respect to Tony Jaa but I felt like Iko Uwais (and company) took everything good about Ong Bak and turned it up to eleven. 

Iko Uwais plays Rama, a rookie police officer on a SWAT Team-esque taskforce that’s, well, tasked with raiding (hence the name) a crime lord’s headquarters—which just so happens to be a high-rise apartment complex filled to the brim with deadly henchmen. Everything goes very south very fast leaving Rama on his own, outgunned and very outnumbered. 

Rama proceeds, in a dazzling portrayal of the Indonesian martial art, pencak silat, to pencak silat everyone’s ass until he reaches the final boss. The basic elements and plot structure echo Bruce Lee’s Game of Death. It’s also somehow basically identical to the reboot, Dredd, although filmmakers in both camps claim cosmic coincidence on that one. I don’t think I’ll ever be totally convinced of that. 

Anywho, other than an incredible stunt and acting performance from Iko Uwais, other notable performances include Joe Taslim as Jaka, who has gone on to produce a very impressive filmography, including a turn as Sub-Zero in the most recent Mortal Kombat and Yayan Ruhian as the crime lord’s number two, Mad Dog. 

It’s hard to pick a favorite fight scene because the entire film is basically one giant fight scene but the climactic battle between Rama, his wayward brother Andi, and Mad Dog is truly poetry in motion.  

All of this coupled with a soundtrack from Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda, I think The Raid: Redemption is a perfect action movie. I was blown away all over again in 2014 with The Raid 2—not only one of the best sequels ever made, in my opinion, but one of the best action movies of all time. Yayan Ruhian (Mad Dog) returns as a different character, Prakoso, equally menacing, but with an emotional angle that really opens up the performance for that actor. The climactic fight scene in this one, between Rama and The Assassin (played by Cecep Arif Rahman) I would put up against any martial arts sequence ever committed to film. If nothing else, please look up and watch that sequence.

Apparently, J.J. Abrams being such a fan of these films is what led to Iko’s cameo in The Force Awakens. And I honestly believe that without The Raid, we wouldn’t have gotten John Wick, which has since become the new The Matrix as far as the film that every mainstream action movie (and every low-budget knockoff) tries to be. Good for Keanu Reeves, though, right? That is a feat, when you really stop and think about it. 

The Raid 3 was planned but ultimately canceled, and I was absolutely heartbroken. It would have been hard to top part two. Still, I would have loved to see everyone try. Exploring the filmographies of Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, and Yayan Ruhian is worth your time if you’re an extreme fan but I haven’t really seen anything that lives up to The Raid. The closest I’ve seen is Monkey Man, which looks to have been at least in part inspired by The Raid. I didn’t see any common cast or crew at a glance, but it was filmed in Indonesia, so, given the style and aesthetic, I would be surprised to find zero people in common between the two productions.