Revolving door of gore best suited for the hard- core
Baroquely violent sequel is just too much and too long for most viewers to stomach
Among the many assassins and enforcers in the endlessly bloody action thriller The Raid 2, there’s one man who uses an aluminum baseball bat to crack skulls, break arms, disable spines and so on. It’s symbolic of the gory brutality of the movie that he also carries a baseball, which comes in handy for more long- distance attacks: he can whap you in the head with a line drive, then move in closer to beat you to a pulp. This particular killer — spoiler alert! — winds up hoist with his own petard, as it were, with the bat embedded in his head.
Baseball Bat Man is a partner of Hammer Girl, a woman who takes two hammers onto a subway car and vanquishes a gang of knife- wielding bodyguards with both ends of the implement: at one stage, she embeds the claw right into someone’s flesh and rips it out, taking pieces of innards with it.
Nor is that all: there is a wild fight in the grey mud of a prison yard; a slaughter in a dank warehouse that turns out porn films; battles in restaurant kitchens where one antagonist will inevitably have his head fried on a grill; a car chase in which an abducted man is strangling the driver with his own necktie as an associate speeds up behind him with a gunman hanging from the door, frantically reaching for his weapon.
The Raid 2 is the baroquely violent sequel to the comparatively austere The Raid: Redemption ( 2011) in which a cop invades a building occupied by gang members and wipes them out, floor by floor. The policeman, Rama ( Indonesian martial arts star Iko Uwais), gets a new assignment here. He has to change identities, get arrested, and go undercover to infiltrate a gang in Jakarta, pictured as a mob-heavy battleground of conflicting loyalties.
In prison, Rama befriends Ucok ( Arifin Putra, a handsome hothead, sort of like Sonny in The Godfather), who’s the son of gang boss Bangun ( Tio Pakusodewo). Rama — who takes on the pseudonym Yuda, which sounds either like The Bible or Star Wars — establishes his bona fides in the film’s inaugural battle, a fight in a prison toilet in which he takes on a few dozen convicts and tosses them aside like so much cordwood.
The fight sets you up for what’s to come.
Uwais is a breathtaking martial artist, and Welsh director Gareth Evans puts his cameras right on the ground to record the blinding kicks, lightning punches and frequent dislocations. They happen more quickly than the camera can move, giving The Raid 2’ s battles a woozy feeling of handheld frenzy.
Uwais’ technique is astonishing ( he’s also one of the fight choreographers) and exceptionally gruesome. This is a movie for hard- core fans.
There is a story here as well, which unfolds over two- and a-half hours and strives, fruitlessly, for the epic scale of The Godfather. Ucok feels he should be given a higher position in his father’s gang, and his manoeuvrings threaten a fragile peace among the ethnic families. A sly interloper named Bejo ( Alex Abbad), who uses a cane to move from one betrayal to the next, sparks the explosion that leads to total warfare.
It’s a confounding conspiracy that is eventually exhausting: too long and too violent, a sprawling sequel to a film that was contained and tightly focused. If there is such a thing as too exciting, The Raid 2 is it.