The Raid · reception & legacy

2012 · Gareth Evans

How The Raid has been received, argued over, and remembered.

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

Influences Gareth Evans has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

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.