"The Raid 2" Review: Bigger, Longer, and Considerably Bloodier

"The Raid: Redemption" was a huge success, and many people consider it one of the best action movies of 2012; the sequel is likely to end 2014 as the year's best action movie. It's pretty different from the first movie; this one actually has a story. This movie is a great mix of a gangster flick and well-choreographed martial arts.

Where We Pick Up

Two hours after the last film ended, Rama (Iko Uwais) is still bruised, still bleeding, and being told the job isn't finished. Corruption runs through his own police force, so he goes undercover into prison to get close to Uco (Arifin Putra), the son of crime boss Bangun (Tio Pakusadewo). Serve the time, earn the trust, come out the other side as an enforcer, then survive the gang war that follows.

That's a real plot, with people in it who want things. Uco is impatient and resents his father. Bangun has spent decades holding a truce together with the Japanese Goto family. A younger operator, Bejo (Alex Abbad), can see exactly where the cracks are. Rama stands in the middle of it all, with a family at home he can't go back to.

If the first film's plot was a straight line up fifteen floors, this one is a web. And it takes its time.

The Set Pieces

The fights aren't in a hallway anymore. Evans took the money the first film earned and spent every rupiah of it where you can see it.

A prison riot in a courtyard under several inches of mud and pouring rain, dozens of bodies going at each other, Rama holding a broom handle he unscrewed himself. Yayan Ruhian is back, not as Mad Dog but as a completely new character called Prakoso, an ageing assassin who gets a devastating sequence through a multi-level nightclub. Hammer Girl (Julie Estelle) takes a subway carriage apart with two claw hammers, then teams up with Baseball Bat Man (Very Tri Yulisman) to come at Rama together. And the finale, in a restaurant kitchen, is Rama against The Assassin (Cecep Arif Rahman) with curved silat blades, which is as close to a perfect closing fight as the genre has.

Evans said the approach was to pick a working space and then use every corner, every object, every impediment in it. You can feel that in every one of these. The mud slows people down. The nightclub gives him levels. The kitchen gives him steel.

The Car Chase

This one deserves its own paragraph.

Rama is in the footwell of a moving taxi, fighting two men in the back seat, while the car is doing real speed down a real Jakarta road with more cars and motorcycles in pursuit. Practical. No plate work, no green screen substitute for the thing itself. Evans puts the camera in places it has no business being, including looking down into the cabin from the roof.

The production had no local infrastructure for a sequence like this, so they brought in a Hong Kong stunt team. Getting the roads was the harder problem. Crew on set at four in the morning, ready to shoot at half six, and police who wouldn't close the road until eight. Then the moment they called cut, the road reopened, and they had to reset their vehicles with traffic coming through.

The whole film was shot over 132 days. Watching the chase, that number makes sense.

Evans Behind the Camera

The director Gareth Evans is masterful at filming incredible action sequences, probably better than ANY Hollywood director working right now. It is inspiring how he managed to make such unbelievable fight scenes and car chases on such a limited budget. The cast did well; the dialogue was fairly good; the choreography was spectacular! Not to mention the unforgettable cinematography, brilliantly handled by people who know what they're doing.

Limited is relative, and worth putting a number on. The first film cost $1.1 million. This one cost $4.5 million. That's four times the budget, which sounds like a lot until you remember what a single American action set piece costs, and then look at what's on this screen.

Evans also still refuses to cheat. The same discipline that made the first film's long takes work is here, applied to bigger spaces and more bodies. Nothing is fixed in the edit. Nothing is covered by cutting fast enough that you can't see it. He is still cutting the film himself, as he did the first one.

This Was Always the Plan

Here's the part that makes the whole thing land differently if you know it.

Back in 2009, after "Merantau," Evans wrote a script called "Berandal." A young man goes into prison, befriends a mob boss's son, comes out as an enforcer, and has to survive a gang war. He spent two years trying to fund it and couldn't. So he shrank the ambition down to one building and one bad night, and that became "The Raid."

Then "The Raid" made $9.3 million on $1.1 million, and the investor who wouldn't touch "Berandal" suddenly wanted to pay for it. Evans went back to the old script and rewrote it into a sequel, adjusting Rama's motivation and threading in the police corruption subplot to connect the two films.

So this isn't a cash-in built after the fact. It's the film that sat in a drawer the whole time, and the first one was the thing he made because nobody would fund it. Sequels are rarely this.

When production started in Jakarta in early 2013, Evans thanked the fans and promised a film that would be "bigger, better and bloodier". Directors say that sort of thing constantly, and it means nothing, almost always. This is the rare occasion where you can hold the finished film up against the promise and find all three delivered.

About That Running Time

The only downside is perhaps the running time, which could have been shortened by fifteen or twenty minutes, but you will still be entertained the whole time.

Two and a half hours is unheard of for this genre, and the honest accounting is that the extra length buys something real and costs something real. It buys you Bangun and Uco actually having a relationship, and a sense that this city existed before Rama walked into it. It costs you the relentlessness of the first film, where the pressure never once came off.

There's also a proportion worth naming. There is more action here than in the first film in absolute terms, and less of it as a share of the runtime. Both statements are true, and which one you notice will decide how you feel about the middle hour.

The Verdict

Overall, "The Raid 2" is arguably one of the best sequels ever, and even one of the best martial arts movies ever. It's superior to its predecessor in terms of storytelling, given the running time, and the choreography was also much improved from the already unforgettable moves in the first one. It had more action and violence than the previous one, although less action percentage-wise. It will keep you on the edge of your seat. It has everything a perfect martial arts movie needs, and it deserves to be regarded as one of the best in its genre.

I hope director Gareth Evans makes more high-budget films to show the world his true potential, and it'd be great to see him feature Iko Uwais, who could be an icon for years to come.