April 3, 2012, 12:06 PM SGT
“The Raid” Takes Indonesian Box Office By Storm
By Ahmad Pathoni
The action movie that has American reviewers raving lately isn’t a Hollywood product or a Chinese martial arts extravaganza. It’s a low-budget Indonesian action flick titled “The Raid: Redemption.”
The Raid, which cost only about $1 million to produce, has taken international film critics and audiences by storm since it won the Midnight Madness Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. It has earned an impressive 85 percent rating on rottentomatoes.com, a U.S. website dedicated to movie reviews.
The film’s international success has also provided a breath of fresh air for Indonesia’s cinema, which is notorious for producing mainly poor-quality horror movies with bizarre and sexually suggestive titles such as “The Virgin Ghost’s Boyfriend” and “Dancing Ghost in the Bathroom.”
“This is the first time in history that an Indonesian movie has been screened in theaters in the United States, Canada and Australia. We are extremely proud,” said The Raid producer Ario Sagantaro. The Raid is due to hit U.K. theaters in May.
The Los Angeles Times called it “a slam-bang, knock-your-socks-off action bonanza” while the New York Post dubbed it an action lover’s dream par excellence. Salon.com had The Raid as its Pick of the Week on March 23, calling it “a dazzling martial-arts sensation,” while Minneapolis Star Tribune declared that the movie “is a kick that will leave your head ringing for days.”
The movie has also proved to be a sensation in Indonesia since it began screening in local theaters on March 23. It was directed by Welsh-born Gareth Evans, who first came to Indonesia four years ago to do a documentary on a local martial-arts form known as pencak silat, and is married to an Indonesian woman of Japanese heritage. While making the documentary, Mr. Evans met Iko Uwais, The Raid’s main protagonist, a silat athlete who was working as a driver for a telecommunications company.
The film follows a SWAT-like police squad on a mission to take out a cold-blooded drug lord Tama (Ray Sahetapy), who holes himself in a rundown Jakarta apartment building with his henchmen. The team soon encounters resistance from gun-toting and machete-wielding criminals loyal to Tama, setting the stage for brutal gunfights and stunning displays of bare-hand battles featuring pencak silat. Iko Uwais plays Rama, a rookie officer who has to finish the mission after his comrades fall one by one.
“The film is so brutal it made me squirm in my seat throughout. The fighting and the cast are top-notch,” said action movie fan Budi Heryana after watching the film in a Jakarta cinema.
Hesti Purwaningsih, a production coordinator at Merantau Films, which produced The Raid, said 250,000 people had watched the movie over its first four days – a great turnout for an Indonesian film.
It’s not clear if The Raid will be able to match Indonesia’s biggest blockbuster hit of all time, Laskar Pelangi (Rainbow Troops), which drew 4.6 million cinemagoers in 2008.
Mr. Evans wrote in his Twitter feed that he was finishing the script for the sequel to The Raid, “expanding the story and ramping up the action a bit.”
Industry observers said The Raid’s success should raise the international profile of Indonesian cinema. In recent years, a new breed of filmmakers has emerged in Indonesia, bringing in fresh ideas and technical know-how, but they are still struggling to break into the international scene commercially.
“I think The Raid shows that Indonesian cinema is catching up with countries whose film industries are already established. It has put us on the global map,” said Muhammad Abduh Aziz, a film producer who is also the secretary general of Jakarta Arts Council.
Indonesia, a country of 240 million people, produced only 82 films last year, and with only about 660 theater screens nationwide, mostly in big cities, there’s a huge untapped market, Mr. Aziz said.
“In (less developed) eastern Indonesia, cinemas are virtually non-existent,” Mr. Aziz said. “The government should provide incentives for business people to open cinemas and finance film productions and distribution,” he said.
He described Indonesia’s current crop of producers and filmmakers as gamblers who are mainly driven by their passion for movies.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty and risks in making films in Indonesia,” he said.