This was an excellent action/martial arts movie made in Indonesia and featuring Pencak Silat.
The movie stars Iko Uwais who puts in an excellent performance from both the dramatic and martial arts perspectives.
The majority of the cast and crew seem to be Indonesian with the important distinction of the director, Gareth Evans who is Welsh.
The movie was the second collaboration between the two men, the first being "Merantau". The Raid is a huge step up from Merantau - the guys talk in videos available on YouTube about the amount they learned by making the first movie.
In other videos available on YouTube they admit how strongly influenced in making the first movie they were by the success of Ong Bak (the influence is very obvious when watching the movie) and how they wanted to do for silat what the other movie had done for muay thai.
The IMDB ratings reflect the great job they did in going from the first movie to the second: the ratings increased from 6.7 to 7.6.
The Raid is available to watch on Netflix.
The reason I am prompted to mention these movies is that the cleverly named "The Raid 2" is in cinemas now.
I remember blogging some time ago about how much I was looking forward to seeing "Taken 2". Then I had to blog about how awful that sequel was.
Well I haven't been to see The Raid 2 yet, but the IMDB rating is currently an astonishing 8.9! If it stays like that it will be in the IMDB top 10!
So I'm really excitied about going to see it.
Here's a picture of Iko in action from The Raid:
