Fundamentally, I like The Raid more than the The Raid 2. The former film was more assured and confident in achieving its stated goals. It was lean, mean, efficient, and it boiled action filmmaking down to its brutal basics while elevating the genre to a ballet of human motion and brutality. It was about construction, form, filmmaking, and camera movement above any conception of character or narrative, and it was entirely aware of this.

The Raid 2 replaces this tight narrative with characters, characters, and more characters. It centers a much larger narrative about two crime families, one Indonesian and one Japanese, at a relative standstill until one of the don’s sons decides he wants to prove himself to his father, or something such as that, by wiping out the other gang. In the middle of all this, for reasons I don’t care to go into and which don’t always make sense, the first film’s protagonist, Rama (Iko Uwais) gets himself involved. There are lots of characters, too many, and the narrative moves every which way over the course of 2 ½ hours somewhat aimlessly. It plays like a hopped-up Infernal Affairs (later remade in America as The Departed) that, while occasionally artistically assembled with flair, still largely amounts to a whole bunch of narrative sound and fury signifying nothing. It’s not a bad narrative, but it is undeniably too long and too full of itself to really succeed as efficient entertainment or as a grandiose crime opera to rival the better films it steals from. Twists mount and mount without any particular reason to care about their nature. Continue reading →