Punching Day: The Raid: Redemption 🌭 (Patreon)

Once, long ago, there was a comedy website that only wanted three simple things: to make people laugh, to teach them a few things, and to make enough money to build a robot that would be our friend, instead of yet another enemy. It succeeded in two of those goals, before getting piledriven into the dirt by corporate scavengers. Some of its archives have been deleted, some of them have been corrupted, and some just suck. You decide which one this is. It’s…

As a fan of "barely making sense" and "exotic beatings," there's nothing I love better than a good foreign action movie. But there's just something missing from the modern ones, and I think I've finally pinpointed what that is: They're translated too well. When I got into foreign action movies as a kid in the '90s, subtitling was a job we gave to alcoholic head trauma victims to make them feel useful to society again. But today’s movies, with their precious "translators" and "understandable human grammar," take all of that magic away.

And so I have turned to the Internet.

Turns out if you want an unreasonably shitty movie experience based on utter nonsense, where all parties involved with telling you a story hate both you, personally, and the very concept of stories in general, then amateur Internet subtitlists have got your back. I was out scouting for sub files for The Raid: Redemption when I stumbled across this screenshot:

And I knew I was home.

The Movie

The Raid has its action priorities straight: There are only a few minutes of hasty exposition at the start to set up the conflict, just so it can get all that talky bullshit out of the way and move right on to the kicking.

Th- ... these elite police officers are going after an entrepreneurial bastard who dared to rent rooms to people? Do they really need a whole SWAT team to take out a shitty landlord?

Pet narcotics lab! That son of a bitch is making dog heroin??? I hope they find a way to kill him twice. I have never been more immediately invested in the destruction of a villain. This is peak screenwriting.

The villain's name is Darkness, and his sidekicks are Besni Fucking Dog Enthusiast and Andi Brain Tamovog Business? Do Indonesian people name their babies by whipping dictionaries at passing helicopters and collecting whatever bits float down?

OK. This is him. This is Darkness. Right there in the middle. Darkness enjoys ramen and does not enjoy bleach. I have to assume his parents were pretty disappointed in him; you name a kid Darkness, you hope for at least some kind of Raven Cloak or throne of skulls. But no. If you had any doubt that this movie was about an elite team of superpolice taking out a building superintendent, here is your proof: This guy is the Indonesian equivalent of Schneider from One Day at a Time.

The van doors open and our raid begins! Almost immediately we get our first hit of action. This dude is getting an axe buried in his shoulder…

And then is hoisted up by his fresh axe-wound and comically flung around the apartment like a flag made out of flesh (whose pole is an axe).

He is axed and re-axed until he’s finally given a consolation prize for being such a good sport about the whole axing thing (hint: It's more axe):

After he realizes a raid is underway, Darkness gets on the intercom and offers every tenant in his building free rent if they bring him a dead policeman. There's our premise: A tenement full of murderous hopeful first-time homeowners versus the axe police.

We're finally introduced to a few of the central characters at this point, and it took 20 minutes to get their names, because we first had to establish how they feel about axes (good) and un-axed dudes (bad). Sergeant Bunyan’s name is actually Poke, which is as adorable as it is unlikely, and the elderly man's name is apparently Lieutenant Login.

That’s a weird choice. I don’t foresee any hacking scenes in The Raid, unless this is all a setup for one hell of an axe pun later. We meet one more important character in this scene, and his name is Bovo. Bovo's main motivation is that he really doesn't like being shot in the neck. So here he is being shot in the neck.

Astoundingly, Bovo does not die from this, but spends every remaining second of the movie silently screaming. I'm not kidding. Here's a screencap of him from 20 minutes later:

But back to the action at hand. Our heroes finally defeat the first wave of murderous tenants via exploding fridge:

Only to immediately stumble right into another Indonesian Spawn Point. It is the only explanation: There are nowhere near as many doors as there are murderous, screaming Indonesians in this hallway:

The whole building is like a clown car, just packed unnaturally full of martial arts experts who hate paying their mortgage as much as they love stabbing cops. Here’s our hero, Rama, decapitating one with a door.

Oh shit, it’s finally time! We finally encounter the man, the myth, the legend, the lover of all canines great and small: This is Besni Fucking Dog Enthusiast.

Aw ... that's our evil badass? He's like five-foot nothin'! He better make up for his lack of stature with a whole lot of heart. Seriously: This dude better be the Rudy of dog fuckin'.

And he totally is! Here’s Poke, the axe enthusiast, swinging Besni like a reluctant man-axe:

Which Besni shrugs off easily, and then proceeds to beat Poke into a sack of loose assorted meats for about ten minutes. See, that's why employers ask about your hobbies at interviews: If you're really, really into something -- like, say, dog-fucking -- that enthusiasm can carry over into even the non-dog-fucking aspects of your job. Regrettably, Poke was our narrator and the closest the movie ever came to explaining itself, so expect things to go way off the rails from here:

Word, Brain Business. Word.

Brain Business may or may not be Rama’s brother, and he may or may not be working for Darkness. There’s some kind of implied history there. If we viewers are going to figure this out, we'll need plenty of time to watch the two build a rapport before we can be certain of their relationship ... which is too bad, because Darkness discovers Brain Business’ betrayal in the very next scene. And he does so the way Darkness does everything: with sober dignity and class.

Brain Business, I want to be sympathetic to your plight, but this is totally your fault for renting from a guy named Darkness. If somebody asks if you wanna move into an apartment owned by Darkness, you decline politely. Same rules apply for renting a boat from The Nothing, or buying a used car from The Void - generally just avoid signing any kind of contract with absences of things.

Let's check back in with our other group of policemen. What are they up to now? Keeping it fucking real:

They came here to do two things: Swing motherfuckers around by the leg-

And kill motherfuckers with household objects, and they are all out of - oh, I’m sorry. They actually have plenty of household objects left.

Here, let's flash forward to the big fight scene. You don't need to know much setup: It's the canine penetration fan versus Rama and Brain Business. As usual, Besni Fucking Dog Enthusiast is overcoming adversity to beat the very souls out of everybody in the room, but that's OK. We all know there's a moment in every martial arts fight where the tide turns toward the good guys. This is that moment in The Raid:

The most epic leg swing in history, followed immediately by two more leg swings:

And …

Then Besni Fucking Dog Enthusiast gets stabbed in the neck with a fluorescent light bulb. That's three -- count 'em, three -- leg swings and one vigorously applied household object to win the fateful battle. It was bloody and brutal and hard to watch, but at least traumatized pooches the world over can breathe a little easier knowing th-

Oh holy shit! Besni is still up and whippin' ass with a light bulb in the neck! Man, it's true what they say: You just can't keep a good Fucking Dog Enthusiast down.

Eventually our heroes prevail, and stumble wearily upstairs to find that Lieutenant Login was the real traitor all along. There's ... probably a reason why he betrayed everybody? I have no idea, because the movie lapses into unfathomable software error tongues for the entire climax. There is only one sentence in Darkness' evil explanatory monologue that looks anything like English, and that is thus:

And you know what? I'm not going to question the translation here. I believe that is 100 percent accurate dialogue. Look at Lieutenant Login's face: That is a man who just found out somebody has been fucking a pillow over his face while he sleeps. That is exactly what my face would look like, if I were to receive that same information: Shock, shame, a little disbelief, some confusion as you try to figure out the logistics of it -- do they fuck the pillow first and then put it over your face? Or do they put the pillow down and kind of leverage their legs against the bed frame to -- no. No, it's better not to know.

Faced with the realization that every pillow he laid his head upon was at some point dry-humped right into his mouth, Lieutenant Login does the only rational thing: He shoots Darkness in the head and then tries to log himself out of life. But his gun is empty. Our heroes take him hostage and exit the building safely. Then the title card runs:

I’m sorry, I forgot to mention: There was an entry fee for this movie. That entry fee was Redemption. Please pay all Redemption to your nearest Fucking Dog Enthusiast.

If I had to fathom a guess, I would say The Raid: Redemption was about an elderly police lieutenant driven mad after being repeatedly face-fucked in his sleep by his landlord. So in retaliation he stormed an apartment building where he and his men swung everybody by the leg until they were dead, dead, dead.

If any of you have seen this magnificent film in a way that made any sense at all then please, you have to promise me: You can never, ever, ever tell me what was happening. I do not want to know what was the fuck.

My life is better never understanding the fuck, or what it was here to do. I wanted only to be close to the fuck, for its brief time here on Earth, and am content to let it pass on with dignity and grace.