Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Isn’t it great when a film can actually keep pace with the hype machine built around it? Welshman Garth Evans’ The Raid is an almost impossibly efficient action film, a no-nonsense juggernaut of lightning-quick martial arts and extreme violence. Appealing so eagerly to our basic sense of gratification, this is very much the bounding, confident actioner that genre fans have been starved of.

The premise is laughably simple; entrenched in Jakarta’s slum district is a desolate apartment complex, which has become a hideaway for the city’s most repellent and dangerous criminals. At the top floor, crime lord Tama (Ray Sahetapy) operates a drug lab, dutily protected by thirty floors of violent psychopaths. Early one morning, a 20-man Swat team, including rookie Rama (Iko Uwais) initiates a dawn raid, sweeping from floor-to-floor, with the single aim of eliminating Tama and his crime empire once and for all.