Director: Gareth Evans | Runtime: 118 minutes | Language: Indonesian (with subtitles)
It’s hard to imagine lightning striking the same place three times, but The Raid 3: Reborn does just that—by blowing the roof off and burning the whole building down. Following the brutal ballet of destruction that was The Raid (2011) and the sprawling, blood-soaked epic The Raid 2 (2014), Gareth Evans’ The Raid 3: Reborn feels less like a sequel and more like a statement: the franchise refuses to go quietly.
Set just hours after the events of The Raid 2, Reborn throws Iko Uwais’ Rama back into Jakarta’s underworld, this time more hollowed out than hardened. Where The Raid was a claustrophobic warzone and The Raid 2 was a gangster opera, Reborn is a slow-burn revenge thriller that explodes in savage, precise bursts of violence. It’s leaner, colder, and more emotionally stripped-down—like Rama himself.
A Dead City and a Broken Man
Jakarta is unrecognizable. The city in Reborn is quieter, more haunted. Power vacuums left in the wake of the last film’s carnage have triggered a silent, invisible war. Evans trades the neon glow and operatic flare of The Raid 2 for muted grays and shadowy alleyways. It’s noir with blood in its teeth.
Rama, having left the anti-corruption task force, is a man unmoored. His wife and child are gone—relocated for their safety—and he’s living under an assumed identity. The only thing anchoring him is the memory of what he’s lost, and the unfinished business still festering beneath Jakarta’s streets.
When whispers surface about a surviving faction of Bejo’s criminal empire reorganizing under a new, more dangerous leader known only as “Reza”, Rama is pulled back in—not by duty, but by instinct. What follows is a slow descent into a city teetering on collapse, as Rama navigates a network of rogue cops, mercenaries, and assassins, each one more desperate than the last.
Violence as Vocabulary
What Evans and Uwais do better than almost anyone else is speak in violence. Every punch, stab, and takedown in Reborn tells a story. There’s less action overall than in The Raid 2, but what we get is sharper, more deliberate. Fights erupt suddenly and end messily. There’s a hallway knife fight that rivals anything in the franchise—not because of its scale, but because of its desperation. The blows feel personal.
Uwais, as always, is a force. But in Reborn, he’s quieter, more internal. His silat is still fluid and devastating, but there’s a new weight to it. He fights like someone who wants it to end, fast. You feel it in his posture. In his eyes. He’s a man who’s killed too much, seen too much, and knows he’s not getting out clean.
Evans, never one to repeat himself, changes the choreography style again. Gone are the extended one-on-one showpieces of The Raid 2. Instead, Reborn goes raw: tighter frames, shorter cuts, and vicious hand-held tracking shots that plunge you into each brawl. One fight in a flooded basement, lit only by flickering emergency lights, is a masterclass in mood and movement.
The Villain: Reza
A sequel is only as strong as its villain, and Reborn delivers. Reza (played with icy restraint by Indonesian actor Arifin Putra, previously seen in The Raid 2 as Uco) is a new kind of threat. He’s not loud or theatrical. He’s corporate, calculating, almost invisible. A former intelligence operative turned kingpin, Reza runs his operation like a black-budget military unit—tight, paranoid, and utterly ruthless.
Unlike Mad Dog or Hammer Girl, Reza doesn’t fight until the end. His threat is psychological. He’s the man who sends others to do the bleeding. When the final confrontation comes, it’s not just about fists—it’s about choices. About what kind of man Rama has become.
Themes: Collapse and Consequence
What sets Reborn apart is how deeply it interrogates the cost of violence. Rama isn’t a hero anymore—if he ever was. He’s a tool, discarded and reshaped by every institution that’s used him. The film spends time in the quiet spaces between fights, showing us a man hollowed out by survival. It asks whether it’s
