Indonesian SWAT meets Black Hawk Down: The Raid

There are bad days, then there are BAD days
There are some great things in crime (fiction) coming out of Asia.  You got everything from wildly entertaining The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly remakes, to Chinese warrior judges, to some pretty tense Thai Thrillers . Of course this goes without mentioning all the awesome books coming out of countries like Japan. For more on that, check Criminal Element’s own Ho-Ling Wong. With all that in mind, I present to you a movie that is everything I could possibly mean when I say “a police action film.”

The Raid is an Indonisan film that is about a lone swat team conducting a raid on a run down tenement building, simply bustling with drug traffickers/bad guys/angry folks with automatic weapons, etc.  Things go smoothly at first, you know, arresting people while they sleep, working to the top of the building, but the drug dealers are just pulling the SWAT further and further into their den so that they will have to fight their way back out. Think Black Hawk Down, but with drugs and police as opposed to militant civilians and Army Rangers supported by Delta Force. 

The movie has made such a huge impression that it has already been picked up by Sony for a US remake and release. I, for one, am hoping they follow through with it. I’m just going to let the below trailer speak for itself. One quick warning, it’s a bit bloody…