@stephenomenal901

7 months ago

Love you for shouting out The Raid movies! The fluidity of motion, the sound editing, which has you "feeling" all of the bone-crunching hits, and all of the stunt performers' dedication to pulling off these master classes of action filmmaking still astound me. My initial draw was learning that Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park co-composed the score to a martial arts movie, but I had no idea how much fun I would have with it. The Raid 2 is one of the rare sequels that somehow improves upon its predecessor, and it's possibly my favorite action movie of all time. Iko Uwais is a superstar, and he and the rest of the cast raised the bar for how solid of acting chops people can possess while also being such accomplished fighters. I think The Raid movies and the Extraction movies would make for a great "quadrilogy," but definitely watch the Extractions first. Chris Hemsworth should be proud of these. The one-shot sequences alone would have justified the ticket price for me to have seen them in theaters. While the premises are simple enough, they play to their strengths: establish the stakes early and set up the dominoes for the protagonist to handle their business. Extraction is like 80s action gold with a nice update, and The Raid films set the pace for films like John Wick to give the action film world of the West a nice kick in the ass the past few years. I also rewatched Collateral recently, and it truly is a career highlight performance for both Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. They had excellent chemistry and stole their scenes with such finesse that it's like they just passed the mic. The third act left a bit to be desired, but the ride had me hooked. Great video, Darren.

3 |