The Case for Raid-ience

Does it snow in Jakarta?

That was one of my few questions about the awesome action martial arts epic The Raid 2, as really, if you are there to question the plot and try and poke holes in the plot, you are at the wrong movie.

The snow in question comes about two thirds of the way through the movie’s rather impressive running time of two and a half hours, beautifying up the death of a relatively cool character.  I am sure the only reason it is in there is to give this character’s demise a bit more poignancy, but my fellow travellers on this martial arts journey barely even registered that snow might be out of place given the climate, so evidently for most people, it is not enough to distract them from the film.

Because the film, despite its running time, is packed full of action and one on one or one on many fisticuffs.  Sure, the in between bits can drag as the story slowly but surely unfolds following on from the tighter, tauter script from the first Raid movie.  But that movie was based on one evening and was confined to a building: this time, there are prisons and warehouses and car chases and subway trains.  

And the people populating this expanded universe are also a lot more varied.  Hammer Girl is rightly famous for being, well, a girl who knows how to use her hammers, but there’s a guy with a baseball bat, another with a couple of curved knives, and a few others with their own particular shtick.  The least successful for me was the criminal mastermind / big bad guy who, with his limp, gloves and dark sunglasses, came across as a comic Doctor Strangelove rather than as a criminal genius that, as an audience member, I am expected to loathe.  

However, the shticks are all just excuses for throwing a wide variety of martial arts action styles at the viewer and at the hero, Rama, back for more of the same after the last film’s finish.  You don’t really get the chance to experience a lot of Rama’s character development, but that is because that is really not the point of the film.  His storyline is there to guide the viewer to different action set pieces, not to provide the actor with a chance to show his emotional range.  And highly successful and enjoyable that path is!

This film will not be to everyone’s taste as it is very much as it says on the box: every death has to have some particular twist to it (if they are a named character of course!) and the martial arts action comes thick, fast, and fatally.  Likewise the camerawork, incredible in its execution (keeping up with the martial arts action must have been difficult or else highly choreographed), could leave you a bit nauseous considering how much and often it moves.

But for a fan of the first film, like me, the sequel to the Raid delivered everything I was hoping for and expected, and then a bit more – including length.  Sure, the extended story did count against it at times, but overall, it came out on top.

Verdict: The Raid 2 is an awesome action film and I was thrilled that it was shown at Readings, and in VO, in Indonesian with English subtitles. 4 broken fingers out of 5.