Welsh-born director Gareth
Evans’ The Raid: Redemption brought a
dizzyingly high level of craft and invention to its martial arts siege movie
set-up. Pretty much the entire film unfolded in a dilapidated Jakarta high-rise
lousy with ultra-nasty criminals who would continually charge en masse upon our hero, Rama (Iko
Uwais), a good cop in a bad, bad city, a guy with extraordinary fighting
skills, sturdy morals and a family he’ll do anything to protect. Evans’ The Raid 2 picks up right where its
predecessor left off, stylishly snowing us with exposition in an arresting and audaciously
elliptical opening sequence that, in short, sends our poor battered Rama right
back into the maw of danger. Though that high-rise mafia haven was conquered, it
turns out that Indonesian corruption is far more rampant than we initially
thought. The city is caught in the grips of organized crime, and plenty of
baddies still need to be smoked out. (I
couldn’t stop thinking about The Act of
Killing while watching The Raid 2—that
appalling and brilliant documentary of last year makes any movie about
institutionalized violence in Indonesia suddenly seem a lot less fanciful.)
Rama
gets sent to prison to make pals with Uco (Arifin Putra), an elder crime boss’
precariously hubristic heir. Upon release Rama becomes Uco’s bodyguard, just as
Uco and rival crime boss Bejo (Alex Abbad), a wimpy Strangelovian dandy-sadist
with shades, a cane and leather gloves, conspire against Uco’s dad and another
Japanese crime family to start a turf war. Lots and lotsa fights ensue, many of
them dazzling, many of them in unnervingly cramped spaces, such as a disgusting
prison toilet or the backseat of a moving car. An especially memorable early
sequence finds Rama in a massive brawl in a prison yard-turned-mud bath the
colour of mocha gelato. So long as the fights go on, I promise you that The Raid 2 is 100% gripping. It’s all
that other stuff—story, character, causality—that doesn’t work so well, or even
make much sense.
The
fact that every single character in The
Raid: Redemption was a world-class fighter was a conceit I was happy to
roll with, especially since everything about the film was so contained.
Extending this conceit to the sprawling urban stage of The Raid 2 is just ridiculous—even tubercular Z-grade pornographers
know how to fight like UFC champs. This sequel is bigger, badder, longer and
more expensive-looking, but not even close to better. There are novelty act
villains—let’s call them Bat-dragger and Hammer Girl—who show up to make
certain scenes more protracted and more baroque than they need to be. At times
Evans seems to be aping the films of Korean auteur
Park Chan-wook—there’s a very silly scene in which dozens of thugs ambush an
old master assassin in a nightclub and the old master’s demise is played as
tragic opera. (I’ve no idea why, if they just needed him dead, they didn’t just
shoot him.) At other times Evans makes sly nods to David Lynch’s taste in décor
and accoutrements. I genuinely appreciate Evans’ impulse to expand his MO, but
these influences are an awkward fit, playing against Evans’ strengths as a
maker of furious, relentless, no-nonsense action sequences. Everything
in The Raid 2 is already so busy and
on such a huge scale, you have to wonder what could possibly come next for
Rama. Intergalactic jujitsu mobsters? Whatever. Just make them fight.
