Gareth Evans’ The Raid: Redemption is spoken of particularly highly by people who appreciate martial arts movies, and there’s something to be said for the fight choreography, which is particularly remarkable at times,

Though the problem is the movie doesn’t bring too much else to the table beyond the aforementioned fighting.

Which means that once the fight scenes get dull–and they do, not because they aren’t well-executed–they are–more than there’re so many of them they become commonplace.

Then there”s the fact that some of the fights are so brutal that a normal human would have been down for the count many blows ago makes the characters often appear superhuman, which clashes with the uber-realistic tone the movie sets.

And I genuinely enjoy superhero movies, martial arts movies, gritty urban dramas as well as stories about police corruption but to mix them all together you’ve got to be extremely careful because too much of any one element, you spoil the whole recipe (or at the very least, skew it toward one particular aspect).

And if that’s your goal, all well and good though I get the feeling hat it wasn’t.