Franchise Friday: The Raid 2 (2014)
Gareth Evans goes much bigger for the sequel, but is it better?
There’s no raid in The Raid 2, but it’s the only thing not in this movie. The sequel to the 2012 action flick goes bigger than its predecessor in nearly every way. The first film’s lean, focused plot gives way to a years-spanning crime story. The fight scenes spill into prison yards and onto city streets, and at one point paint the floors and walls of a restaurant kitchen red. Iko Uwais’ Rama is no longer a rookie cop in over his head but a highly trained undercover agent sent to sniff out police corruption in Jakarta.
It’s, apparently, the movie director Gareth Evans wanted to make from the start. His original plan after his debut, Merantau, was for a no-holds-barred epic, merging the brutal grace of Pencak Silat with the emotional undertones and procedural thrills of something from Martin Scorsese or Michael Mann. When he couldn’t get the funds, he whittled the idea into a contained Die Hard homage, which was successful enough to get the greenlight for a sequel that let him do anything.
The result is a 150-minute, heavily plotted police story punctuated by some of the most astounding martial arts sequences put to film. The jittery, handheld action of the first film is replaced by slick, patient cinematography, and long sequences focus on the political maneuverings of the Jakarta mob. It’s a stylish, deliberate actioner that releases an all-timer of an action sequence whenever it starts to lag. It’s, in every way, a bigger, louder and more ambitious film than the first.
But can I be honest? Upon this rewatch, I don’t know how much I like it.
Police story
The Raid 2 opens an unspecified time after the first film, but short enough that the repercussions of those events are still being felt. In the first scene, Rama’s brother Andi, whose relationship with the hero was the emotional anchor of the first film, is shot by the henchman of a city mobster. Meanwhile, Rama has been recruited by a secret police unit to go undercover, befriend the son of a crime boss, and get the names of dirty cops. This unit plays by its own rules; to wit, the commander shoots Rama’s corrupt old captain point black as punishment for his betrayals.
Rama is, once again, sent away from his wife and newborn son to go undercover in prison to cozy up to the young inmate, named Uco, an attempt that takes him two years. After his release, he goes to live and work with Uco in his father’s compound. Uco is ambitious and constantly looking to take charge, leading to betrayals; he ultimately attempts war with their Japanese counterparts, and instigates a massacre involving hitmen armed with machetes, hammers and baseball bats.
It’s really a sequel to The Raid in name only. Iko Uwais still stars as Rama, and the character is still the same silent, principled type, but there’s no other connection to the first film. Evans wants to prove he can make a “real movie,” and I’ll give credit where its due: the film’s cinematography is lush and stylish, and Evans makes the most of long, sustained shots. It looks sleek and cool as hell.
But the story is too complex for its own good, and derivative of numerous better crime dramas. There’s a weak attempt to suggest that Rama’s morality is being compromised by being part of the group, but the character is written so straight-laced and steadfast that his integrity is never truly questioned, and Uco is such a loathsome character that there’s never a Point Break-esque tension about Rama becoming too close. The conflict between Uco and his father has potential, but it’s mired in a morass of plot points regarding Uco’s betrayal plot, and everything is so convoluted that it makes little sense. It doesn’t help that Evans also chooses to jump back and forth in time willy-nilly, with no real reason except that it allows him to get to fight scenes more quickly.
There are scattered ideas introduced that the film never follows up on. Rama supposedly misses his wife and son, but aside from one or two phone calls, there’s no emotional weight or hint that the character is truly desperate to return home. There are suggestions that the captain heading up Rama’s operation might not be on the up and up, but they amount to nothing. Some ideas, like the hitman (Yayan Ruhian, in a different role than in the first film) whose life choices have isolated him from his wife and daughter, or a team of assassins who use bats and hammers, are exaggerated and stylish, almost as if they were brought in from a comic book. But they don’t mesh with the more grounded undercover story that consumes so much time.
“So what,” you might say. “We don’t go to a Raid movie for the plot; we go for the action.” And we’re about to get there. But the film’s story takes up so much time and moves so ploddingly that it makes the action sequences feel like brief gulps, shoehorned in inelegantly to goose the story.
And even those fight scenes leave me a bit mixed.
Rumble in Jakarta
The Raid 2’s sprawling plot allows for Evans to get more creative with when and where his action sequences occur, and he and his cast pull off several of the most energetic displays of athleticism and choreography I’ve seen. Early on, Rama is in prison and takes on 15 men in a bathroom stall; it’s brutal and bone-crushing, and the way the actors move in the confined space is baffling. It’s an amazing sequence, and it’s probably the shortest fight scene in the entire movie.
There’s another prison fight that spills out into a muddy yard, where dozens of men claw, kick, bite and stab, all but suffocating each other in the wet dirt. There’s a warehouse fight that moves with humor and energy, and it’s followed by a one-on-two-dozen brawl in a nightclub that exists only to show how amazing one character’s moves are before he’s unceremoniously killed just to move the plot around. There’s an unbelievable car and motorcycle chase that I still don’t understand how they pulled off, and a melee on the subway involving hammers that induces involuntary winces. Rama’s final assault on the main boss’ restaurant is an exhausting sequence that involves another warehouse fight, a final showdown with Bat Boy and Hammer Girl, and a knife fight in the kitchen.
Every action scene in The Raid 2 could conceivably be on a list of the greatest fight scenes of all time. The choreography remains fluid, fast and yet coherent. There’s grace amidst the bloody brutality in several of the sequences, and Evans somehow manages to keep the camera moving and focused throughout. By the end of the film, as Rama emerges from his last battle, the exhaustion is palpable.
But there’s a sadism that bothers me, particularly in the final stretch. Evans seems to take an almost fetishistic glee in the carnage. It’s not enough for Hammer Girl to hit people with tools; we have to see her use the hammer claw to stab and rip her opponents, blood spurting out of the wounds. One villain is shot in the face at close range with a shotgun; the camera lingers on his blown-apart head. The film’s final kitchen fight involves knives, and the combatants slice and dice each other. By the end, the floor and walls are slick with blood, an aesthetic choice that feels more in line with a slasher movie than an action flick.
It’s not that The Raid wasn’t bloody. There were knives and close-up brawls. But the film’s nonstop pacing made it feel less obsessed with the carnage, and more in line with the movie as a survival tale. The Raid 2 doesn’t just seem to want to top the first film’s stunt work; it wants to assault audiences and show them as much carnage as possible, and the result is off-putting by the end. Maybe it’s just a part of growing older; this didn’t bother me on my first viewing. But watching it eight years down the road, with a host of tragedies constantly dominating the news, it all makes me a bit sick to my stomach.
For awhile, Evans floated the idea of doing The Raid 3, but nothing came of it. That’s probably for the best; The Raid 2 packs so much into it that it feels like two or three movies in one, and the concept never got much better than the first entry. Instead, the franchise’s legacy seems to be the way it inspired movies like John Wick, which appropriate its close-quarters combat but dress it up in enough action-fantasy mythology to keep it divorced from reality, which makes the violence go down a bit smoother.
So, that’s The Raid franchise. A legit great movie followed by a sequel that has some fantastic stunt work but is otherwise a mess.
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