The Raid 2 [18]

Dir: Gareth Huw Evans

Gareth Evans' breathlessly acclaimed The Raid was a treat for martial arts fans; a lean and focused actioner that, for most audiences, served as an introduction to Evans, his star Iko Uwais and the style of Silat.  It made a virtue of limited plot and character by driving the minimal narrative largely through its action scenes and for many martial arts fans was the most notable new film in the genre since Ong Bak.

You have to admire Gareth Evans for having both the ambition and the bravery to completely junk the structure that served him so well in The Raid for this sprawling sequel.  The film picks up with Rama (Uwais) minutes after the last film ends.  Confronted with the fact that his family is now in danger because of his actions he agrees to go undercover to infiltrate and destroy the gang he fought in the first film, this time from the head down.  It's another simple story, but this time Evans stretches the telling across 3 years of story and 150 minutes of screen time.  This is the killer blow that the film lands, squarely to its own head.

The Raid 2 is the film of a man with nobody to say no to him.  As director, writer and, perhaps most importantly, editor, Evans is most assuredly in creative control here and so the film's myriad failings must be laid squarely at his feet.  We'll come to the action scenes in due course, but it's clear both from his earlier Merantau and now from this film that Evans' gifts are not primarily as a storyteller.  For most of the punishingly long first two hours there is little action and instead what we get is not so much a flip through as a page by page narration of a play by play on the clichés of gangster movies.  The film grinds tediously through the same double crosses and stock character types (the aging boss with the ambitious son, for example), complementing them with baldly expository dialogue and performances that never rise above the functional.

There are some peculiar choices here, especially in terms of how Evans decides to handle such niceties as character development.  Uco (Arifin Putra), the junior boss who Rama ends up working with, is quite a developed character, as is his much more controlled father.  Rama, however, never develops an ounce more personality than he had in The Raid, despite the fact that he should have a personal stake in events this time out.  Yet more baffling is the choice to, out of the blue, give a sentimental backstory to the character played by Yayan Ruhian, who was Mad Dog in the first film (it's not clear if the characters are supposed to be related).  In it's most cringemakingly miscalculated moment, the film then tries to milk this backstory for laughably unearned pathos.  Interesting ideas (Rama's personal stake and journey, the question of whether Rama's boss is a crook himself) are shunted aside for a paint by numbers gangster movie and the film slows to a snooze-inducing crawl.

The film's first two hours do have a few action beats, but they tend to be brief, suggesting that the film is finally, blessedly, about to kick into gear only for it to then slide back into neutral.  An additional problem, to my surprise, is that the action isn't always especially impressive.  A relatively early scene sees Rama involved in a mass brawl in the prison where he is undercover.  The problem is that the scene is often quite fast cut, and when you add that to the fact that everyone is covered in mud it's tough to get any sense of the flow of what's going on, or even where Rama is.  This scene is also silly, because the film has already established that Rama has actually been tried and sentenced for an actual crime, and for longer than expected.  Given that, you might think the several murders he commits in this scene would be a legal issue.

With the exception one sequence I'll address later, for the first two hours The Raid 2 barely engaged my attention.  Even when the action ramped up briefly it felt perfunctory; a sop to action fans, a bribe to drag them through the next lake of tedium lying between them and the last half hour of the film.  The film has raised the stakes for itself by trying to stretch its legs and tell a more engaging story, and the fact it doesn't achieve it is another reason that the action feels underwhelming; we're not involved with anything else, why should we be involved with the action?  This is a pervasive problem with the film.

Taken on their own terms the action scenes of the first two hours are generally well choreographed, but story problems and some overuse of shakycam kept me from becoming totally involved.  Only one sequence, slap in the middle of the film, really pulled me in during this part of the film; the scene that introduces the characters destined to be The Raid 2's breakout stars Hammergirl (Julie Estelle) and Baseball Bat Man (Very Tri Yulisman).  These two, apparently brother and sister, are all but mute and the ferocity they unleash features in the film's most sedately shot and cut action scenes.  Both of their fights (which are cross cut) are impressive in their brutal beauty but it's Estelle's Hammergirl, unleashing Oldboy-shaming levels of hammer violence with an impassive expression on her beautiful face, who steals the show and will from here on out be a poster image on the walls of martial arts loving teenage boys.

The film does finally ramp up into a sustained series of action scenes in its last half hour, but again, much of it feels bolted on and perfunctory.  There are also odd problems; for a film so heavily plotted I really wasn't sure how Rama ended up knowing which warehouse he should go to for the first of the end of movie fights and in an otherwise impressive car chase Evans' editing made me lose my sense of space and even of which car Rama was supposed to be in.  That said, there is some truly impressive action in the film's last half hour.  The car chase also features an impressively claustrophobic close quarters fight in a moving car and Rama's long awaited face off with Hammergirl and Baseball Bat Man doesn't disappoint.  The third of the major henchmen (let's call him curved knife dude) also gets a dynamic and brutal showcase, but I couldn't help feeling that as a final fight (which it shouldn't be, I was waiting for a twist involving the crippled gang boss) it was a disappointment, largely because the kitchen setting offers so many opportunities for inventive prop use, none of which are taken.

The Raid 2 has already been called the greatest action movie ever made.  That was always likely to be nonsense, because both Die Hard and The Prodigal Son already exist, but for it not to even be the best action film released in the past four weeks is a massive disappointment.  Evans' ambition can't be faulted, but he has spread himself much too thin here and if he wants to truly expand his canvas he needs to work with actors whose talents are broader based and spend much more time on his character development.  There are moments of excitement here, but they are far too few and far between to add up to anything that mitigates the tedium and disappointment of the bulk of the film.
★★

The Raid [18]

Dir: Gareth Huw Evans

I'm a big fan of martial arts movies and of action movies more generally, and while we've had a few great ones of late it's been something of a fallow period for the genre for my money, so here comes The Raid, riding a wave of hype so boundless that you'd have to bet that there is no possible way it can live up to what has already been said and written about it. I walked in excited, but also wary because I was seriously burned by the hype with Cabin in the Woods, so, does The Raid deliver?

The third feature by Welsh writer/director Gareth Evans, but the first to gain a high profile, The Raid has an almost embarrassingly simple story. The film is set in Indonesia, but really could have taken place anywhere in story terms as all you need to know is that there is a building filled almost entirely with members of drug dealing gang, and that a force of about twenty cops (including Rama, played by Iko Uwais) is being sent in to take out the leader and take down his operation. Shooting, machete fights and kicking ensue.

The Raid isn't deep, but it does at least tell a coherent story, and present one reasonably surprising twist in between the action scenes that are its raison d'etre, which is a step up from a lot of martial arts films. The action shifts emphasis as the film goes on, and Evans refines his style accordingly. Early scenes are frenetic and more about gunplay, and here Evans employs the shakycam and rapid editing style that has been so modish in action cinema lately, but as the film moves from larger scale fights between groups of distant opponents to ever closer quarters battles as the number of people in the tower shrinks the cutting rhythm slows a little, and the camera becomes more sedate and stays further back. To his immense credit though - and this is likely testament to his involvement, along with star Uwais, in choreographing the action - Evans always manages to keep the geography of his action scenes intact, we get who people are, and where they are in relation to each other, which makes even the scenes that employ shakycam more fun.

While the first act is tremendously entertaining, the film really hits its stride when most of the guns are empty and the fights become more up close and personal affairs, it's also at this point that Iko Uwais - largely in the background for the first act - steps up and demonstrates that he's a force to be reckoned with on screen. The first real showcase comes in a scene reminiscent of Oldboy's hammer fight - Evans, in the best possible way, wears his influences on his sleeve throughout - in which Rama has to take on an almost endless stream of knife wielding bad guys while also protecting an injured colleague. It's here that we first really see what the film has in store choreography wise, and it's mightily impressive.

The martial arts style on display here is Silat, which I had neither heard of nor seen before (I love martial arts movies but, for the record, am not a practitioner of any style). Looking at it here there are certain aspects that seem to relate to Muay Thai (use of knees and elbows), but there seem to be influences from Chinese styles too. The pace of the moves is often blistering, and the impact is definitely felt (without, so far as I can tell, the use of much in the way of 'power powder'), and Evans' refusal to back down from the extremes of violence suggests that as a filmmaker he owes more to the directorial style of Sammo Hung than to Jackie Chan.

While it's always fun to watch a great martial arts or stunt sequence (the only problem being that at the cinema you can't rewind any of the 'holyshitdidyouseethat?' moments), it's a nice touch on the part of Evans' screenplay to bring a personal dimension into the film in its third act. By doing so he raises the stakes and creates a degree of tension in the film (we KNOW Uwais won't die, but that doesn't make anyone else safe), which makes the big three way set piece fight that caps the film's action off more narratively gripping than most final set pieces. As I said, it's easy to see the influences on Uwais, Yayan Ruhian and Evans' action, but they don't copy their heroes, rather they reinterpret, finding their own very particular and hugely entertaining and impressive style. There are scenes here - the drug lab fight for example - that can stand with the best fight scenes I've seen on screen.

The Raid is a great calling card for Evans and Uwais (who gives a strong performance, and is much more charismatic than martial arts cinema's last anointed new star, Tony Jaa), but more than that it's just a great night out. I always try to evaluate a film on how well, for me, it achieves what it is attempting to do. On those terms these 100 minutes are just about flawless; the film grabbed me early on, and refused to let go until its final moments.

★★★★☆