Gareth Evans’ buzz-creating martial arts film The Raid—which was released in the US as The Raid: Redemption—basically showed up the last twenty years of Hollywood action filmmaking in embarrassing fashion. Heck, The Raid was so good it might be the most thrilling action movie of all time. It hedged its bets by being solely about the action though. The structure of that film, which consisted of a hero fighting his way up a building full of bad guys until he got to the main boss, was so simple that it might as well have been the basis for an 8-bit video game, and not the plot of a feature film. The Raid made it clear to the world that Evans was a top-notch director of action scenarios, but whether or not he could handle the other aspects of making a good movie was still a big question everyone who was new to his work had. Well, seeing as The Raid 2 is a sweeping crime epic with a near two-and-a-half hour run time, it looks like we now have our answer. That answer being a resounding yes he can.
The Raid 2 picks back up with our hero from the first film, Rama (Iko Uwais), pretty quickly after his surviving of the raid of the criminal stronghold from the first film. The basic plot sees him getting inducted into a super-secret faction of the local police force meant to root out corruption, and the basic plan is that he’s going to be thrown into jail, gain the trust of a powerful crime lord’s son, gain entry into said crime lord’s criminal empire, and then find out what public officials he’s been doing business with. Things don’t end up going as smoothly as planned though, and there ends up being about a half dozen other competing interests that all poke their noses into the proceedings, so by the time everything hashes out, The Raid 2 ends up being a fairly involved film. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with movies as ambitious as this one is, but thankfully Evans is able to avoid all of the usual pitfalls, and he’s also able to make that two-and-a-half hours of movie fly by so fast that you don’t even notice your butt getting numb. I guess it’s helpful when half of it is hanging off of the edge of your seat though (seriously, that’s not a cliché, this movie will affect your posture).
One of the big reasons that an action movie this long is still successful, probably predictably, is that The Raid 2 contains some of the most ambitious, thrilling, and well-constructed action scenes that have ever appeared on film. Aside from that obvious asset though, there are also a couple of storytelling strategies that Evans uses to make sure that his movie keeps moving. His story is one that involves a lot of players and a lot of competing motivations, but he still manages to keep things simple enough that you don’t ever have to give much thought to why anything is happening or what it all means. There’s a town that’s full of crime, a number of players who want a bigger slice of that crime pie, and one ass-kicking cop who’s caught in the middle and will probably have to take everyone down. This is a Gareth Evans movie, after all, so the focus is still firmly on the action—so much so that the body count gets nauseatingly high.
To get back to the characters for a minute though, it should be further explained how easy to follow this movie is made for Ugly American audiences. Sometimes, when you’re watching a foreign film that’s full of character names that aren’t names you’ve ever heard before, it can get pretty challenging to keep everyone straight, but Evans has such a knack for casting actors who are interesting looking that it’s never much of a challenge to remember who’s who. When one guy looks like Captain Caveman (Yayan Ruhian), one is a slick metrosexual (Arifin Putra), and another a sleazy criminal who always wears sunglasses and walks with a cane (Alex Abbad), it doesn’t really matter much who’s Prakoso, who’s Ucok, and who’s Bejo. And it definitely helps when there are characters named Hammer Girl (Julie Estelle), Baseball Bat Man (Very Tri Yulisman), and the Assassin (Cecep Arif Rahman).
We don’t get too bogged down with fleshing all the combatants out either. This is an action movie, straight up, so there isn’t much need for it. Every character gets a few aesthetic quirks to let them stand out, maybe one piece of biographical information that serves as their motivation, and then that’s it, it’s off to the races. In a movie where the action is boring and pedestrian, your mind might start wandering off to things like character depth and development, and you might decide that the characters you’re watching are a bit too loosely drawn, but when the action is as good as it is in The Raid 2, all you need is one small excuse to care, and everything ends up not only working, it ends up being so awesome that your heart races and your fists clench. Just try to walk out of this movie without doing a few little kicks in the air at imaginary opponents. I dare you.
Simply put, The Raid 2 contains a handful of legendary action sequences—the sort that cause an audience to stand up and spontaneously applaud. The first one that’s really standout takes place in a mud-soaked prison yard. It’s the sort of brawl that involves so many players and that holds its shots for so long without cutting away that it had to have taken an insane amount of planning to pull off. Technical considerations aside though, it’s also just really fun to watch. The martial arts skills of the performers and the fight choreography here are just off the charts, and Evans knows how to present his action so that all of that skill gets highlighted as much as possible. There’s a car chase that stands up next to all of the hand-to-hand stuff in the movie too. It’s fast-paced, hugely destructive, and there’s even a close quarters fight that’s happening in one of the speeding cars during its whole duration. This movie is like action lasagna. You could keep yourself occupied just trying to pick apart how many different layers of violence are happening simultaneously. The big fights at the end don’t disappoint either. The Raid 2 doesn’t quite stick to the simple video game structure of The Raid, but the climax still feels like a series of boss fights, and watching Rama take on Hammer Girl, Baseball Bat Man, the Assassin, and then all of the puppet masters pulling the strings makes for a great grand finale.
There’s just so much to say about the way that Evans shoots action. It’s not just the speed of the fights, the brutality of them, or how well they’re shot, there’s also the fact that he’s able to build up suspense before all of the good stuff goes down, which makes it hit with even more impact. Look at his use of slow motion. Filmmakers like Michael Bay or Zack Snyder overuse the effect, often presenting entire action sequences in a slowed down frame rate, which gets tedious. Evans starts out his action scenes with only a little bit of slowness—the clenching of a fist, the grasping of a weapon, or the drip of a drop of sweat—he makes you bite your lip in anticipation of when things are going to cut loose, and then when they do, it all seems even faster and crazier for that moment of delayed gratification.
The beauty of his photography when juxtaposed with the brutality of his violence also adds layers to the proceedings. The sets are dressed so lavishly and are so lovingly framed that you get lost in them, and then you have to watch five guys get their throats slit with a box cutter against such a gorgeous backdrop, and suddenly your stomach starts to do flip flops. Seeing such a flagrant disregard for human life presented so stylishly is jarring, and it kind of makes you question how we respond to violent movies, and what that response says about us as a society.
That said, there were a few moments here where the level of the violence started to feel a bit egregious. When people think back to The Raid, what they remember most is the doorway kill, and a couple of other moments that were equally as creative in their brutality. That’s because, when they’re used sparingly, especially brutal moments of violence can be an effective tool to get the audience’s adrenaline pumping. The Raid 2 doubles up on these moments of shocking though inspired brutality—or maybe even triples up on them—and I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a portion of the film where all of the skull-crackings and ligament-slicings didn’t become a bit too much. When so much graphic death gets piled up in front of you all at once, it becomes difficult not to contemplate mortality in a real way, and to do so takes you out of the hyper-violent fantasy of The Raid’s world. You go past just thinking about movie violence and start thinking about violence in the real world, which is a bummer. The problem wasn’t so bad that it kept me from getting back on board and cheering my head off during the big finale, but it was present. Maybe, when you’re dealing with violence on this sort of level, a little bit of sanitized A-Team blandness is necessary? Or is that a irresponsible position to take when it comes to onscreen death?
No—no—I don’t think so. Ultra violent action movies are awesome, especially when they’re put together by someone as twisted and talented as Evans. Maybe next time around he can keep a little bit of an eye on exactly how many skulls he’s having get split open per second though. The amount of graphic bloodlettings in the original The Raid seemed to be just about perfect, so it looks like that old “less is more” adage might actually sometimes be true, even if Hollywood takes it too far when they’re churning out PG-13 blandness. Minor quibbles aside, The Raid franchise remains a refreshing alternative to the mainstream action movies that have been hitting the multiplexes in recent decades, and for that we should all be thankful.
