Review: ‘The Raid 2’

“The Raid 2” is a brutal movie. Masquerading as an action film, it is actually a mob infiltration drama mixed with a horror movie, in which the horror comes from the fact that an intense fight scene can break out at any moment, during which our monster hero proceeds to cut, rip, break, brutalize and dismember his opponents in increasingly honorific ways, blood splattering everywhere. You will know him by his trail of dead. And he’s pretty much the only good cop in all of Indonesia. Rama (Iko Uwais) is fresh from surviving the first raid from “The Raid,” and he gets quickly co-opted into a small undercover internal affairs unit meant to sniff out all the dirty cops in the city. Part of his job includes getting sent to prison where he could make friends with the son of a crime kingpin and then through him infiltrate that crime family and then find out who the dirty cops are from there. Easy enough in theory, anyway.

And that is pretty much the crux of the plot, Rama being undercover and trying to find out who is who, and in the meantime there is some family drama between the head of the family and his son, who wants more responsibility than his father gives him, and there’s a rival small time gangster trying to make a name for himself and oh yea by the way he had Rama’s brother killed so MOTIVATION and you know? There is absolutely nothing storywise or plotwise that you have not seen before in any other movie. The elements are very basic. It is how in how these elements are mixed together and presented. That is what makes the difference.

Because really, ANYONE can make a crime drama action movie with lots of stunts and people running around shooting guns at one another for whatever reasons, hell, people do all the time, just look at all those low budget cheap crime and action movies released direct to video and on Redbox and Netflix and whatnot. But because Gareth Evans knows what he wants and how he wants to present all of this action, this movie is loaded with an incredible style, with lots of tense build ups to what end up being epic action sequences, often featuring tough looking stunts, brutal violence and a quick moving camera that captures all the activity while managing to stay back far enough to actually SHOW everything.

Now because of the somewhat sprawling story used to string together all of these over the top and insane action scenes, “The Raid 2” ended up being two and a half hours long, and that is just too damn long. I appreciate the attempt to make something so epic and interesting, especially compared to the first film’s much more threadbare story and lack of character development, but with the actual story itself there is nothing new, nothing that hasn’t been covered in other crime dramas. This movie definitely could have been cut down a bit and made shorter and tighter, that would have helped, but it still enjoyable as all hell.

And VIOLENT as hell! Warning: if you aren’t into a bit of the ultra violence, you may wanna stay away from this movie, which features people breaking limbs, getting fast stabbed, throats get cut, broken bottles are put to horrific use, faces get shotgunned off, people get hammers to their soft parts, all in very graphic and brutal fashion. So genre fans will be in heaven with this thing, but others will find it hellish to get through.

A more violent more in 2014 you will not find, “The Raid 2” has the added benefit of actually being really well made, with only a rote, overly long plot keeping this thing from becoming one of my instant favorites of the year.