Review of The Raid 2 (2014) by Tom S — 02 Jun 2014

Judd: In 2012, The Raid: Redemption was released. It was a movie with an Indonesian cast and a Welsh writer/director, the action was all close up, lauded for its grizzly gore and non-stop action. The plot was simple, a SWAT team becomes trapped in a building as they try to flush out its mob owner and his gang. Running at 101 minutes the movie was the perfect mix of action, blood and just enough story to keep it moving.

After the success of the first movie director Gareth Evans returns to Indonesia for The Raid 2, where everything is definitely bigger, but not necessarily better. The run time has been expanded by an extra 50 minutes, and instead of one location, there are fights in every conceivable local in Indonesia; prison, subway, rice patty, street and restaurant to name just a few. This time around Agent Rama is tasked with fishing out dirty cops working for a local mob boss. To infiltrate the mob, Rama must befriend the boss' son, an ambitious fellow who feels neglected and underutilized by his father. One convoluted thing leads to another and Rama finds himself in the middle of a three-sided mob war.

The action scenes are phenomenal and extremely well choreographed. Evans knows why people are coming to see this movie. Actor Iko Uwais is ridiculously fast and the camerawork, while slightly shaky, features the up close fighting like in the original; however, not quite enough. This is why I was surprised that the runtime was bloated to over two hours with a plot, while convoluted, is your standard Shakespearian son crosses father affair. The acting is nothing to write home about, though Arafin Putra and Alex Abbad manage to set themselves apart and command a presence the other bodies didn't seem to have. In fact, because the movie is subtitled and the characters are so interchangeable, it took me about half the movie to keep them all straight in my head.

Cinematography was also lacking. I would think that after investing the time and bodies into an intricately choreographed fight sequence, you would want to show the action blow-by-blow. I understand that a wildly quaking camera is a cheap and effective gimmick to hide shoddy staging, but I don't think that was the reason here. It felt like Evans wanted dynamic shots too complex for a dolly, but couldn't afford the steadicam.

It's unfortunate that Evans served as writer and director and, due to the success of the first, probably had carte blanche. The film suffers from excess. Some are saying it's an excess of violence and blood, but for me the excess came from its grand story that was never compelling. Judicious editing could have trimmed at least 30 minutes off and brought the movie down to a manageable 2 hours. The same day I saw The Raid 2, I saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a movie that is also nearly 150 minutes long. The difference between the two is that the story carried Captain America and didn't act as fodder to get us to the next action sequence. Ten actionless minutes can feel like an eternity when you don't care what's happening on screen.

Judd: ** 1/2.