Gareth Evans will attend the screening.
Audiences will be scrambling to find enough compound adjectives to describe Gareth Huw Evans’ hard-driving, butt-kicking, pulse-pounding, bone-crunching, skull-smashing, blood-curdling martial arts siege movie, The Raid. Welsh-born Evans turned heads with his 2009 feature, Merantau. He teams again here with the same breakout action star, Iko Uwais, marrying Western genre conventions with the traditional Indonesian kickboxing discipline of silat. Rookie cop Rama (Uwais) heads out with a SWAT team on an ill-planned mission to bring down sadistic underworld kingpin Tama (Ray Sahetapy), who rules over a seedy population of thugs, criminals and junkies from his headquarters in a fortress-like Jakarta tenement block.
Most of the 20-member SWAT team are pulped before they know what hits them, leaving only a handful of men to weigh the choice of survival or the near-certain suicide of proceeding to the 15th floor to get the man they came for.Full of dynamic physical stunts and imaginative death blows, the movie balances moments of intense quiet with fresh crescendos of visceral violence. This kind of relentless noise and carnage can be numbing in less skilled hands, but Evans, who also handled the rapid-fire editing, brings elegance and imagination to the outrageously charged action, as well as unflagging energy. - David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter