Russian Raid

The Russians made their own version of The Raid and it turned out to be a pretty nice action B-movie, but one that lacks a few things to make it a hit. The story is simple, going more or less from action scene to action scene, but I have some reservations about that. You can see that the Russians have tried, I guess it's their first martial arts genre film, but anyone who's seen some, especially from Asia, will have the same problem as me. What I can praise is that the characters can hit each other, they use an interesting Russian fighting style called Systema, which is very fast and effective, and thanks to decent camera, it doesn't look downright bad. But there are some issues that degrade the action. Firstly, there's an outright lack of violence, at one point they fight with historical weapons, but no one gets killed, there are no fractures, and hardly anyone dies in this film, it feels a bit mechanical and artificial. My biggest problem, however, is with the sound design, it was very bad. You barely hear or feel the punches, rather you hear a kind of funny clapping, which takes a lot away from the dynamism and drive, and when there was shooting, it made it seem like they were using Airsoft guns, which personally bothers me a lot. I understand that the budget wasn't high, but they could have kept this in mind. Anyway, there were some interesting elements of choreography here and there. The villains are mostly giant Russian gorillas and the soundtrack is nice. The frequent action won’t bore you, but there is a lot to improve. 5.5/10. (05/03/2021)