The Raid, released in 2011 by director Gareth Evans and action star Iko Uwais, is arguably the best hand-to-hand combat action film of all time. It cemented the duo (and Indonesian cinema) on the world stage and on the shelves of action movie buffs everywhere, and influenced action movies for the rest of the decade (most notably, the John Wick franchise). Its roots, however, can be found two years earlier in Merantau.
Hollywood fight choreography in the 2000s was filled with shaky cams, stunt doubles, and quick cuts, but Merantau is a throwback to classic martial arts movies, with long takes that show off the actual fighting instead of relying on camera tricks. This is only possible with a bona fide movie star, and Uwais has since shown that he is the most charismatic and gifted action star since Jackie Chan. As the story goes, Evans was filming a documentary about pencak silat, the Indonesian martial art, and was so taken by Uwais’s screen presence that he immediately cast him in his next film.
Uwais plays Yuda, a young man from a countryside village in Indonesia who makes his way to Jakarta in hopes of teaching pencak silat. He finds out that life in the city is not so easy, and when he tries to step in to protect a girl from getting beaten up, he finds himself caught up in an underground world of gangsters as he protects the girl and her little brother.
While Uwais is still wide-eyed and babyfaced in this film, Evans was also still learning his craft. Merantau is frequently melodramatic and the overuse of slow motion feels clunky and keeps the movie dragging at points. It’s certainly overlong at 2 hours, and probably should have been a tighter 90 to 100 minutes. In later films, Evans gets much better at using the slow pans and pushes effectively. But we can still see his incredible ability to stage and shoot action scenes as well as eye for shot composition (Evans really loves his bird’s eye shots).
We can’t forget about Yayan Ruhian either, who has a pretty limited but very memorable role as a (clean shaven!) villager turned bodyguard, leading to a fantastic elevator scene that clearly influence much more famous elevator scenes like in Winter Soldier and Drive. In fact, you can see Merantau‘s neon-drenched fingerprints on later films by Nicolas Winding Refn, with a sense of stylishness that Evans would revisit in The Raid 2.
Merantau is downright slow at times, but in the second half erupts with some explosive action scenes, including some of the signature, marathon fight scenes with the intricate fight choreography that we’ve now come to know and expect from Evans and Uwais. It eventually crescendos in a non-stop, frenzied, almost exhausting adrenaline rush of hand-to-hand combat. If you haven’t seen The Raid, go watch it. But if you’re an action movie fan looking to dig a little deeper, Merantau is worth a watch.
