“It would be easy to just list all of the things that make The Raid 2 a great action movie — the one-eyed, deaf woman who chooses to fight with a pair of hammers, the guy who kills people by hitting baseballs at their heads, the nightclub fracas that unexpectedly turns operatic” — Robert Gifford
Say a prayer for the action genre. The big-budget Hollywood action movie is quickly going the way of the dodo, pushed aside by the PG-13 CGI spectacle of the superhero genre, the few remaining action franchises devolving into nostalgia or ironic self-parody — looking at you, The Expendables and The Fast and the Furious.
As with the automobile, the space shuttle and every other faded sign of Yankee dominance, America just can’t make good action movies anymore. Those with a taste for gunpowder and bloody knuckles have been left increasingly starved, reduced to nibbling on down-and-dirty straight-to-DVD cheapies, foreign imports and memories of the days when Arnold Schwarzenegger was just a blockheaded movie star, not a maid-humping politician.
But while Hollywood might be too busy with men in tights bloodlessly wrestling in front of green screens to work on the next Bullitt, there are, fortunately, still filmmakers in the world who prefer their stunts physical and their fight scenes loaded with squibs to the point of excess.
The Raid: Redemption, a nasty little 2011 Indonesian beat-em-up about 20 police officers fighting their way to the top of an apartment building infested with gangsters, was such a film. It was short, cheap, brutal and kind of dumb. And it was awesome.
Featuring lightning-fast pencak silat martial arts and tight pacing that kept the bare bones, good-guys-kill-bad-guys story from ever wearing too thin, it was as pure and viciously entertaining an expression of the action genre as had been seen in years.
Following in the footsteps of every successful action franchise in history, The Raid 2 is bigger, longer, more expensive and less focused than the original. It’s also superior. At about an hour longer, it’s not nearly as taut as its lean-as-they-come predecessor, but its increased budget gives director Gareth Evans (V/H/S/2) the creative freedom simply to do more.
While The Raid: Redemption was limited to a series of fistfights and shootouts in nearly identical apartments and hallways, its sequel has the time and money to try out a car chase, a prison-yard brawl and an epic tale of betrayal and generational tension in a Jakarta, Indonesia, criminal family — and Evans proves himself a capable hand at everything he tries. (Well, maybe not the family drama, but nobody’s perfect.)
It picks up right where The Raid: Redemption left off, with heroic cop Rama (Iko Uwais, Man of Thai Chi; he’s a minuscule juggernaut who also choreographed The Raid 2’s fights) agreeing to go undercover to expose corruption in Jakarta’s police and politicians. The plot gets a bit confusing, especially in the early going, when the audience is expected to remember a host of not-particularly-memorable details from the original while also learning a new set of names and faces. Even once everything sorts itself out, the plot is hardly anything remarkable, the kind of dynastic mob struggles you’ve seen half a billion times since The Godfather (with a touch of Donnie Brasco thrown in for good measure).
But who cares? All concerns are washed away the moment the first punch is thrown, in a prison bathroom melee that sees Rama, trapped in a stall, defending himself against dozens of assailants with nothing more than a rusty hinge.
As with his terse characters, Evans is better with action than words. His dialogue feels like it was copy-pasted from any number of other movies, but he smartly relies on his visuals to tell most of the story. Even the protagonist’s motivation is mostly sketched out through images. The way Evans contrasts gray, decaying public spaces with the ornate, brightly lit majesty of the rooms the wealthy gangsters inhabit makes clear the city is being bled dry by corruption — and that Rama’s righteous fists are the only means to set things straight.
Like many modern directors — John Hyams (Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning) comes to mind — Evans frequently withholds cutting, especially during action scenes. Long takes have become something of a trope of late, but they’re used well here, especially during the aforementioned prison yard free-for-all. With scores of guards and prisoners beating one another to death in the mud, it feels as if there simply isn’t enough time for a cut; Rama’s under attack from all sides and one blink is enough to make the difference between life and death.
It would be easy to just list all of the things that make The Raid 2 a great action movie — the one-eyed, deaf woman who chooses to fight with a pair of hammers, the guy who kills people by hitting baseballs at their heads, the nightclub fracas that unexpectedly turns operatic — but words don’t really do this type of movie justice. You don’t think about The Raid. You feel The Raid in your gut, like a swift kick to the stomach.
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