Having finally listened to my betters, we come now to the The Raid…or The Raid: Redemption as its North American distributor, Sony, insists on titling it. Because that was cheaper than paying the the people who own the rights to “The Raid” as a movie title. A vast and varied speculator market’s grown up around buying such things. It’s like buying website domain names: most just sit on ’em until some hungry company comes knocking. Then (the thinking goes) you can extort whatever you want from desperate suits sweating a national release date some other suit probably picked at random the year before.

But sometimes the suits wise up and think, Wait…we can just add a semicolon! And stick whatever bullshit we want on the other side! Nobody will know the difference! Nobody will care! Besides…it’s a Foreign Film…and no red-blooded American with an ounce of sense will dare mar their eyes with one of…those. All true…except in my case, because I’m a natural contrarian who grew up on Japanese sci-fi films. So I’ll watch anything once…unless an overwhelming majority of the pop culture critics I watch/read/respect start speaking in one voice.

Back in April, that unified Voice told me The Raid rocked and rocked hard. I didn’t pay ’em any attention. James Cameron’s incredibly gauche decision to re-release his incredibly profitable piece-of-shit, Titanic, on the centennial anniversary of the actual sinking of the Titanic…pretty much broke my brain until The Avengers patched it up and restored my faith in the human race…for all of five minutes. If I’d seen The Raid in theaters back when you were all telling me I should that might’ve lasted the full ten. Continue reading The Raid: Redemption (2011) →