Iko Uwais' debut movie Merantau poised The Raid films for success in several key ways. Released in Indonesia in 2009 and releasing internationally in 2010, Merantau follows a young man named Yuda (Uwais), who ventures from his tiny village to Jakarta and encounters a human trafficking operation. Armed only with his skills as a Silat exponent, Yuda must fight to stop the ring's overlords Ratger (Mad Koudal) and Luc (Laurent Busan) and save the captive Astri (Sisca Jessica) and her brother Adit (Yusuf Aulia).
Written and directed by Welsh-born filmmaker Gareth Evans, Merantau was a big hit, but it was his and Uwais's follow-up movie The Raid: Redemption that truly shot them both to stardom in 2012, with Evans and Uwais re-teaming again in 2014 for The Raid 2. Everything from the Bruce Lee-based series Warrior to Marvel's Daredevil has been influenced by The Raid's impact on action movies and fight choreography. However, the components that made The Raid films successful can be traced back to Merantau. Here are the four ways that Merantau set up The Raid movies for the success they would achieve.
4 Merantau Made Silat Mainstream Before The Raid
While Silat has been utilized in the fight choreography of action movies before, Merantau was the first mainstream martial arts film to really showcase it on an international scale. Merantau opens with Yuda training in Pecak Silat forms and having a sparring match with his father before his departure to Jakarta. In both its intro and the subsequent martial arts fights of Yuda battling the movie's human trafficking villains, Merantau plays great care on being as reverential as possible to Silat as a martial art at every stage.
The Raid would benefit from that with Merantau having provided a kind of Silat appetizer ahead of its release. In doing so, this gave The Raid license to essentially jump straight into the action with only the most basic of set-ups needed for its plot. The Raid 2's fight scenes would subsequently also benefit with Silat-based fight choreography increasingly mainstream by the time of its 2014 release, which gave it the chance to tell an even grander crime-story with Silat action. Moreover, Merantau also made action aficionados take notice of Indonesia as a rising territory in the martial arts movie world, which The Raid movies were able to capitalize upon.
3 Merantau Brought Together Key Players Of The Raid Movies
Following their previous work together on a Silat documentary, Merantau was the first big break for both Gareth Evans as writer and director and Iko Uwais as leading man, but there was also a larger ensemble at play. Yayan Ruhian also portrays the tragic antagonist Eric, a formidable Silat exponent himself who ends up facing Yuda in the movie's elevator fight. With Dony Alamsyah and Alex Abbad respectively playing Yuda's brother Yayan and crime boss Johni, all would go on to be heavily involved in The Raid movies.
In The Raid, Yayan Ruhian is both chilling and captivating as the villainous Mad Dog. Alamsyah also returns in a more prominent role in The Raid as Rama's brother Andi, with the two facing Mad Dog in The Raid's heart-racing two-on-one showdown. The Raid 2 later not only saw the return of Evans, Uwais, and (albeit briefly) Alamsyah return, but also Ruhian as the blade-wielding henchman Prakoso, with Abbad graduating to the string-pulling gangster Bejo. In assuming the cast of Merantau, Evans was able to pull players both major and minor into The Raid movies as the characters who made the movies as engaging as they were.
2 Iko Uwais' Merantau Role Helped His Onscreen Persona In The Raid
As he is introduced in Merantau, Yuda is a naive young man venturing into the unknown, and whose situation becomes far direr than he had ever imagined. Though Yuda is a highly-skilled Silat exponent, what he anticipates as a simple rite of age becomes a harrowing fight against human traffickers. Yuda ultimately ends up making the ultimate sacrifice in dying to save Astri and Adit, and his everyman charm and innocence make the first-time leading man's death scene a true tear-jerker. It also set the template for the kind of hero Iko Uwais would go onto portray in The Raid movies.
Though Rama is better prepared for what he's getting himself into than Yuda, he is still heading into an arguably far more dangerous situation of fighting an entire apartment complex of killers and criminals in The Raid's video game-like scenario. Rama's mission requires even greater personal sacrifice in The Raid 2 when he is forced to go undercover (using the pseudonym of Yuda, no less) in a prison to infiltrate a Jakarta crime family. It was in Merantau that Uwais first demonstrated his capabilities of embodying that as a first-time actor that he would bring into The Raid movies. Meanwhile, one of his Merantau co-stars went in the opposite direction.
1 Merantau Positioned The Raid's Villain For A Breakout Role
In Merantau, Yayan's Ruhian's aforementioned Eric is a man in a bad situation, in the employ of the movie's human trafficking villains and believing he cannot escape their iron grip (the longer Indonesian cut of Merantau also shows Eric pummeling an opponent in an underground fight after he and Yuda meet on the bus to Jakarta.) After Yuda and Eric's elevator fight, Eric sacrifices himself to save Yuda from being shot, and while this is a redemptive death for the reluctant antagonist, Ruhian's performance and fight scenes also established his skill at portraying antagonists. Enter Mad Dog in The Raid.
On top of being a highly formidable Silat fighter, Mad Dog is an utter psychopath in The Raid, voluntarily setting aside his gun to kill police sergeant Jaka (Joe Taslim) in a fight and describing doing so as "the pulse". Even as the character with the smallest stature in the movie, Ruhian's Mad Dog dominates his opponents with frightening ease, Rama and Andi together just barely managing to defeat him in the final fight. The Raid simply would not be the action classic that it is without Ruhian's performance as Mad Dog, while the same is true of his role in The Raid 2.
Ruhian's Prakoso in The Raid 2 is closer to Eric in Merantau as a mob enforcer too entrenched to get out, and just as unstoppable as Mad Dog in a fight. Prakoso's death scene, after being betrayed by Uco, is also portrayed as a real tragedy, and the two Raid movies combined fully launched Ruhian. Bringing his ferocity and screen presence to roles like Huana in the Skyline sci-fi franchise and a Shinobi assassin in John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum, Ruhian's breakout in The Raid movies had the benefit of building on his performance in Merantau, showing his talent as formidable and intimidating villains, anti-heroes, and everything in-between.
While Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais are best known for The Raid movies, Merantau is an equally essential chapter in both of their careers and those of the movie's ing players. At face value, Merantau might look like the lead-in to a break-out hit common for many filmmakers and action stars, but that does not do it justice. It was Merantau that gave The Raid movies everything they needed to become such enduring action classics, and that influence is one that Netflix's The Raid remake should continue to carry over.
