Sightlines · reception
How The Raid was received
2012 · Gareth Evans · The Raid on Sightlines
The arc
No reappraisal needed — it detonated at TIFF Midnight Madness in 2011 and arrived already crowned, with critics calling it the best action film in years. A decade-plus on, its stock has only risen: it's now the standard-issue benchmark every new action movie gets measured against.
What’s debated
The eternal twin-film fight: The Raid vs Dredd, two 2012 'cops fight up a criminal tower block' movies, endlessly relitigated — plus the sequel schism over whether the lean original or the sprawling Raid 2 is the real masterpiece.
Its footprint
'The best action movie since The Raid' became a stock critical phrase, and its pencak silat DNA spread through Hollywood — its stars turned up in The Force Awakens and John Wick 3, and every brutal single-location hallway fight since gets tagged as Raid-influenced. Mad Dog's 'pulling a trigger is like ordering takeout' energy made Yayan Ruhian an action-nerd icon.
Where it stands
Locked into the modern action canon — a Letterboxd action-list perennial and the 'you must have seen this' initiation rite for anyone who claims to love fight choreography.
Did you know? Welsh director Gareth Evans discovered star Iko Uwais while shooting a documentary about pencak silat in Jakarta — Uwais was working as a delivery driver for a phone company at the time. And the US release got a new score co-written by Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda.
Named by the director
- Die Hard (1988) — Evans cited the classic one-building siege thriller as a structural touchstone for trapping his cops in a single tower.
- Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) — Evans pointed to Carpenter's lean siege movie as a model for The Raid's stripped-down, wave-after-wave structure.
- Hard Boiled (1992) — Evans named John Woo's gun-fu opus as a key influence on the film's relentless, escalating action set-pieces.
- John Woo — Evans has repeatedly cited Woo's heroic-bloodshed films as formative for how he stages and escalates violence.
- Sammo Hung — Evans cited Hung's choreography-first Hong Kong filmmaking as a guide for shooting fights wide and legible.
- Jackie Chan — Evans named Chan's Hong Kong work as an influence on building fights around environment, props, and clarity.