Gareth Evans
The Raid Berandal

This film had a somewhat complicated genesis. And from a complicated genesis came the evident apocalypse of action cinema. An apocalypse that frames Evans' career, exalts it, and carves it in capital letters on the "mount of the righteous," rewriting the rules of the genre.
It should have been called just "Berandal," with "The Raid" it should not have been connected at all (and in fact -spoiler- it isn't) and should have come out a long time ago. At least in theory, because then at a certain point, they weren't even supposed to make it anymore, and Evans was on the verge of failure.

But let's take it step by step.

Evans claims to have left the UK because he was surrounded by too many people who loved him too much (which is the exact same thing Pazienza will say about his departure from Bologna in a brief interview with Red Ronnie that unfortunately I can't retrieve for you. Well, it doesn't matter anyway), moved to Indonesia with his wife, and found his ideal starting point.
Here, he directs small stuff he likes. He enjoys oriental martial arts cinema, is content with little, and is quite happy.
One day, while strolling through the streets of Jakarta or somewhere around there, with a nice gado-gado ruining his digestion, he meets two athletes who earn a living pretending to fight in front of paying audiences. Street fighter performers (who, as I understand it, are like the street artists of Indonesia), Yayan Ruhian (for friends "Mad Dog") and Iko Uwais (for friends, "the young one"). He likes the way the two of them fight, with that fluid martial art, and so, amidst a slap and a kick in the gums, he tries to get to know them. And given that by now the north wall of the "mount of the righteous" is practically a giant photo of his name, you've already understood that he succeeds. He lets them know that he makes films and would like to work with them.
They high-five, "right on brother," and a solid trio is born.
Which then becomes a quartet: Evans has always worked with the same cameraman, claiming they have their own lingo about what they want to achieve and understand each other in an instant. And beyond the kind words expressed by Evans towards his friend, just 5 minutes of film are enough to understand that yes, it is all true: there is an alchemy between the two that is an integral part of the excellent result achieved.
Well, the group is formed.

I said it a bit haphazardly since I don't precisely know how things went, but it's an important moment: the indispensable trio needed for the creation of the best action film of all time is born (which, in case you hadn't figured it out, is this one).
But we're not there yet, we're stuck in 2009, the year "Merantau" comes out. The film is rubbish: amateurish direction, horrendous cinematography, Scott Adkins in the cast. But we're in Indonesia, and the country had never seen productions like this. The film sells well, and Evans is liked.
Buoyed by his first success, he immediately starts writing a second film titled "Berandal." He'll have more money, do things better, and it will be fantastic. But it's a pity, all this, because he is the only one who thinks so: for months, he annoys production companies with his new script whose subject is: a young man in prison becomes friends with the son of a mafia boss, once out he also becomes part of the organization, and witnesses his friend's rise to power, at some point he will change his mind, get his head straight, and try to resolve the mess he created by dismantling his former mean comrades.
They all tell him to shove it.
The situation begins to turn bleak, tending towards meat brown, then switches to gray, and before it turns black, it pushes Evans to abandon the project and dive into a quick screenplay for a film that costs little and can be made quickly. Our guy was beginning to not even find the coins to buy himself rice (let alone gado-gado).
In record time, he quickly drafts the screenplay for something that answers to the name of "The Raid-Redemption," finds a producer, and starts working.

And the angels start blowing their trumpets.
He doesn't have much time and must shoot a lot of fight scenes that he already knows will take tons of time, so he has a brilliant idea (note: even the sharpest are already copying this, in ten years it'll be studied in film schools).
He wants to arrive on set knowing exactly what to say, what to do, and especially having already printed the final result on his retinas? It's not difficult; you shoot everything twice...
before filming starts Iko, Yayan, The Cameraman (I'm sorry I couldn't manage to get his name) and Evans meet in the gym, for months. Filming fights, editing them, refilming, correcting them. what they achieve are all the film's fight scenes shot in a gym with just two actors. But it's already all there: choreography, shots, editing. It's just a matter of replicating everything in the studio with lights, costumes, and actors.
Which is easier said than done, but someone rightly points out that "The Raid Redemption" is all about fights, that the fights have to turn out well (and Evans is demanding to a stressful degree) and, in short, to put it briefly: to stay on schedule, the filming of the fight scenes lasts on average 14 hours a day.
Now, how do you tell ten/twenty people to jump, run, and throw themselves to the ground... for 14 hours straight for three weeks (keeping in mind that it takes just one of these to have a five-minute fit, punch you once, and you find yourself in a Jakarta traumatology ward amidst broken bones and dubious hygiene)? Another functional idea that will prove fundamental later: Evans doesn't just direct on set; during downtime, Evans edits the footage in advance, and at any sign of complaint, he stops everything, puts on the premontaged footage from the previous day, and says, "yes guys, I know I'm asking a lot, but look at what we're all doing together." And in Indonesia, they had never seen anything like this (4 months later, the film will arrive in the United States, Hollywood glamorous and cocaine, and even there they had never seen anything like it).
Genius isn't just about not getting your face broken; genius is that while replaying the stuff to his guys, Evans here and there realizes that some scenes could be even better, and then, on the spot, makes reshoot a full shot or some tight shot, thus giving even more defined rhythm to the final product (even this they are stealing, this too will be studied).
Besides all this, there are long takes, a desaturated cinematography that is so made in England that it takes your breath away (something completely absent in the previous Marentau), and a plot... mad: a SWAT team enters a building for a quick job. The area's bosses find out, close the building, and try to kill them all. One of them will save himself.
end.

It's action from start to finish. But not only that. It is what the first Resident Evil or Silent Hill were (on PlayStation, not screen, because today we're talking about genuinely good films). There is nothing that can relate the aesthetics, the mood, the modus operandi of the direction, to oriental combat cinema, Evans for reasons partly of taste, partly dictated by time, admittedly shoots a survival horror.
The final result for the spectator is a cyclothymic alternation of adrenaline and suspense. To be honest, the possible final results for the spectator could be: "oh, what nonsense, it's a stupid film that says nothing" (an opinion I can ultimately understand, after all, out there, 99% of people think the purpose of a book and a film are the same).
Or a severe orgasm. Of those that when you're done, your balls hurt (if you're a woman, of those that give you a cramp from the sole of the foot up behind the knee, but well, it's a film purely testosterone-driven, and probably therefore more suitable for men).
The film doesn't just "go well": the film is an orgy of assent, in America they buy the remake in less than a year.
Evans doesn't miss the golden opportunity and becomes its executive producer ("Yes, I'll be the producer of a terrible American remake, forgive me"... how can you not like him?), and riding the wave of success (everywhere but here, here in 2011 the action films that did well were Thor, Real Steel and the first Captain America – nothing to say about the second, and for obvious reasons: it's one of the many films living off The Raid's experience).
As we were saying, riding the wave of success, he gets a nice big check signed in the dark by some shady oriental figure to finance the inevitable sequel to The Raid.

And here, Patbam, he plays the wild card.
Because he can do whatever he wants since the film is called The Raid 2 and it will sell a lot, his producers know this better than him. And so he takes the protagonist of the first film (who is a cop), makes him end up in prison undercover to study the behaviors of a boss's son, and that's it, from then on it's his old "Berandal", with the difference that his protagonist has a few more reasons to make the film make sense.

And shooting begins. More money and more time means needing and surely wanting to pull out a better job than the first (which let's remember, is something Evans did primarily to pay his bills, and he didn't even remotely enjoy directing it, indeed, as much as he's enthusiastic about the final result, he claims the memory of the filming period gives him anxiety... I've colored this a lot, but that's the concept).

To do a better job than the first, paradoxically, it is necessary to work exactly like with the first film: shooting the fights in the gym and working on them there before the actual filming; editing directly on set, Having short times because it's true that you have more weeks compared to the raid, but you also have 100 more minutes to shoot.
During the filming, not a single piece of news leaks out. Then one day, early to tell the truth: I never expected that having more time available would still mean practically not having any at all; one day a trailer comes out. Or rather, no. It's not a trailer: Evans in the first film would have liked to cut a scene that in hindsight, once the film was projected in front of an audience, he found excessive. But the scene was very beautiful and it took time to shoot so it was too bad to delete it, but, after all, leaving it was a mistake (for those who have seen it: in the elevator, knife in the neck. And personally I partially share the director's opinion).
It's something that often happens to have good scenes that don't fit into the film's economy (it's also true that having scenes at Evans' level is decidedly less common) and even in this "The Raid 2" (or "The Raid Berandal", call it whatever you want) a couple of scenes Evans deleted. however, he really likes one and then decides to publish it on youtube the day the film gets announced. And so before the film, the fans could enjoy the deleted scene. Which as someone said: "it's absurd how a deleted scene can be the best action scene ever seen up to that moment." and below here I'll then link it to you because leaving it out would be a crime.

And then finally the film arrives. which is magnificent on one hand and totally poor on the other: the plot sucks, it’s convoluted and useless. But, and here is a BUT as big as a house, who cares.
The film has four or five fight scenes (very long), that pick up what was done in the first "The Raid" and take it to the extreme with impossible long takes (both films are shot with the Ronin, which for those interested is a kind of steady cam that doesn't carry all the downsides linked to steady which weighs a ton. To illustrate: the Ronin you can pass to another operator while you're filming, the steady no, then there are another two thousand differences but if you want, we can talk about it below, today I don’t feel like beating my chest too much) the shots change and you begin to smell the cordite of Sergio Leone in the air (farewell survival horror) and many many other things that now I don’t even feel like thinking about anymore (but how long have I been writing? Hey, forgive the verbosity).
More money means more locations, and the horizons and the edges of the shots widen, which well: what does that change? It changes that if you have to film a soccer field and make it beautiful doing the lights is more complicated than doing them for a coffee table in the living room (more or less, here the discourse is a bit more complicated and I won't even talk about it below), and the photography of this "The Raid 2" is something marvelous. There isn’t a frame, not one, where the lights are not scream-worthy, or where the geometry of subjects and environments don’t make love with good taste. I might be excessive, but there’s a red and white scene in a restaurant that screams Refn through every pore, and it doesn’t look bad at all.
And then the characters: he stuffs the useless plot with just as many useless characters but with a charisma that could fold Dominic Toretto (I deliberately chose the only salvageable thing from the first F&F. Because compared, for instance, to the cast of Twilight, the dumbest character from Evans’ film would win the charisma match with as much difficulty as Rhett Butler wins against that ninny of Hamilton).
It’s the apotheosis of action cinema: the best action ever, tied to breathtaking frames and photography. The plot is true that “it's there but isn't” but it’s an A-list movie and movies are cinema, and cinema is image. And The Raid Berandal is cinema in its purest state (as incompetent people say on specialized magazines)
Well that's enough. here I should place a conclusion but what a bore: how much have I written? I still have a ton but you guys have probably had enough for a quarter of an hour by now. Let’s greet each other, shall we?
bye, take care. And watch The Raid immediately. Which one? I don't know, I don’t understand anything anymore, it's not even clear to me which one I reviewed. Watch both, it will do you good. Or harm, it doesn’t matter: watch them.