Review: The Raid 2

After the events of the first film, cop Rama (Iko Uwais) is tackling the big-time gangsters in this outing. Working with IA, Rama is assigned the task of serving a contrived prison sentence to get close to Uco (Arifin Putra, smooth but volatile), hoping to get a gig as hired muscle for Uco’s powerful kingpin father Bangun (Tio Pakusadewo). The idea is to ferret out the bad eggs in the police department in cahoots with the crims. Thrown into the mix are a rival gangster named Bejo (Alex Abbad, as quirky as his rival is stoic), and a Japanese mob. Yayan Ruhian turns up as an expert killer who longs to patch things up with his estranged kids. In between hacking limbs and kicking arse, that is.

 

I guess you can’t blame Welsh writer/director/editor Gareth Edwards too much for getting overly ambitious in this sequel to the top-notch martial arts/action-thriller “The Raid”. For this 2014 film, he’s basically inspired by more epic-scale cops-and-crims pics, particularly from Hong Kong, as well as a touch of Francis Ford Coppola. Unfortunately, the problem is “The Raid” worked because of its no-frills, hard and fast, violent nature. It was a blast and a half. This sequel is slow, drawn-out, and far too unwieldy. At times, it’s frankly rather boring. A film like this really ought not go for close to 2 ½ hours, especially when you’re mostly working with martial arts guys, rather than top-drawer actors and a script that’s as old as the hills. This was a massive disappointment to me, albeit punctuated by moments of undeniable pure awesomeness.

 

Sure, nothing tops the first film’s awesome three-way ‘boss fight’ (the best of its type of all-time, in my view), but when this film is good…oh boy. The prison fight is completely ricockulous, but because the film had been drowning in talk up to that point, I couldn’t help but enjoy the respite. Even better is a later fight in the prison yard (and in the mud, I might add), which is fucking epic stuff in the best sense. The film is almost worth seeing just for this set piece alone. Meanwhile, Edwards kinda shot himself in the foot last time by killing off actor/fight choreographer/bad arse Yayan Ruhian. So what’s the solution? Bring him back inexplicably, in a completely different role. And he’s in fine form. This guy is such a bad arse that he carries a machete whilst taking down a bunch of thugs…and waits until the last guy before he bothers using it, relying on his fists and feet the rest of the time. He also doesn’t bother running when said last guy starts to run away. He’s such a bad arse that he knows he doesn’t need to run, just briskly walking after him. Bad. Arse. His character is a fascinatingly layered one, too. A sad man doing bad things for even worse people, you can never quite sympathise with nor entirely hate him. There’s clearly a lifetime of sorrow and regret in his performance…and then he just goes and beats the fuck out of about 10-15 guys in the film’s second-best action set piece. Goddamn, that Mr. Ruhian. He’s my new hero. Unfortunately, just as you’re really starting to enjoy this scene-stealing turn, well…let’s just say that his character is a minor cog in the wheel that is this film’s plot. In fact, his character’s role in the film’s overall plot ends up seeming rather pointless. Thoroughly enjoyable for sure, but still pointless.

 

Somewhat making up for Mr. Ruhian’s absence is a fantastic cross-cutting between a guy beating brains in with a baseball bat (and sometimes even using the ball), a chick mowing people down on a train with two freaking hammers, and another group targeting a guy in a grassy field. It’s a bravura set piece, with the sound of the baseball bat hitting flesh unforgettable. The 2 on 1 between Uwais, the baseball guy, and the hammer chick in a confined space is pretty terrific too. So there’s definitely some great stuff in this for action fans. There’s also a really terrific performance (by far the best in the film) by Brandon Lee-lookalike Arifin Putra, who also speaks pretty perfect English. Make this guy an international star already! I was actually surprised to find that he’s a German-born Indonesian (with a German father), because he doesn’t look remotely like any of the other Indonesians in the cast. Lead actor Iko Uwais is coming along nicely as a thespian, he’s clearly got something, but he can’t save a film on his own. His character this time out just isn’t interesting enough to carry a film of this length, especially given the story is so unwieldy that his character seems to get lost in the shuffle for periods of time. He’s the main character!

 

The camerawork by Matt Flannery and Dimas Imam Subhono is better this time out, not nearly as shaky. In fact, some of it is truly inventive, making things look even more brutal and impactful. However, whoever was responsible for filming the fight in the car should be raked across the coals (Edwards apparently did the action choreography, with stars Uwais and Ruhian doing the fight choreography). It’s lame, but only because the overhead camerawork reveals the artificiality of it all. The car has no roof, or else the shot would be impossible. Besides, Jon Foo already did it better in “Bangkok Revenge”. The resulting freeway chase screams of a director doing something simply because he has the money and freedom to, whether it’s worthwhile or not. The long, gory fight in a kitchen would’ve been even more fun if not (yet again) for the obviously fake set-up of a kitchen far too spacious to be realistic. No commercial kitchen would be that roomy, even when empty. Still, that sure is a lot of blood being spilt. Wow.

 

Even with the rather hackneyed plot (which cribs quite a bit from “Eastern Promises” and “Only God Forgives”, the latter of which also seems to have inspired some of the set design) there’s probably a really good 85-90 minute movie in here somewhere. Unfortunately, someone thought they were the second coming of Sergio Leone meets Wong Kar-Wai and has tried to make a big crime epic. It doesn’t work, but there are masterful moments of action here and there, and look out for Arifin Putra in the future. That guy’s got something.  

 

Rating: C+