- UK release: April 2014
- Director: Gareth Evans · Writer: Gareth Evans
- Studio / distributor: PT Merantau Films; XYZ Films; Sony Pictures Classics
- Genre: Martial-arts action crime epic · Runtime: 150 minutes (BBFC 18)
- Main cast: Iko Uwais (The Raid, Merantau) as Rama; Arifin Putra as Ucok; Oka Antara as Eka; Julie Estelle as Hammer Girl
- IMDb: 7.9 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 81% critics / 87% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
Two years ago Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais took a tiny budget, a single tower block and one trapped cop, and made The Raid the most talked-about action film in years. It worked because it refused to do anything but the thing it did, which was put a man at the bottom of a building full of people who wanted him dead and let him climb. The obvious worry about a sequel is that you cannot bottle that lightning twice, and that the only way to follow a perfect siege is to make it bigger, which is usually how these things go wrong. Evans has gone bigger. He has also, against the odds, gone better, at least where it counts.
The setup
Rama (Iko Uwais) walks out of the first film with barely a few hours to rest before he is recruited into a long undercover assignment. To protect his family and pull a corrupt police network out by the roots, he lets himself be sent to prison to earn the trust of Ucok (Arifin Putra), the restless son of a Jakarta crime boss. Once on the outside he is folded into the family business, a careful truce between an Indonesian syndicate and its Japanese counterpart that Ucok is itching to break. Rama spends the film holding two faces at once, the loyal soldier and the buried policeman, while the ground shifts under everyone around him. This is a far larger canvas than the tower, and the plot is dense with rival bosses, side enforcers and slow-burning betrayals.
The cast
Uwais carries the film, and his gift is that he can act with his whole body before he says a word. Rama is quieter here than in the first film, watchful and worn down, a man performing loyalty he does not feel, and Uwais lets the strain show in the stillness between fights. Arifin Putra makes Ucok genuinely unpleasant, a spoilt heir whose impatience is the engine of the whole tragedy, entitled and dangerous in equal measure. Oka Antara brings a weary decency to Eka, the right-hand man caught between duty and conscience. The film also knows how to build an icon out of almost nothing: Julie Estelle’s Hammer Girl, a deaf assassin who works in train carriages with two claw hammers, has perhaps ten minutes of screen time and walks off with a chunk of the film.
The craft
Evans directs the action as if mediocrity were a personal insult. The camera moves with the fighters rather than cutting around them, the geography always stays legible, and the choreography by Uwais and Yayan Ruhian has a brutal clarity that most western action long ago traded away for shaky cutting. The two stand-out sequences, a mud-soaked prison riot and a car chase shot partly from inside the cars with the fight continuing through the windows, are as good as anything the genre has produced. The pencak silat fighting is fast and bone-deep, the violence frank and unglamorous, and the editing, also Evans, holds shots long enough to let you feel the cost of each blow. The score and the rain-slicked, neon-and-concrete look give the underworld a real weight.
How it stacks up
The shadow over the plot is Infernal Affairs, the cleanest undercover-cop story ever filmed, and The Raid 2 cannot match its precision; the criminal machinery here is more sprawling than gripping. As pure action escalation the better comparison is John Woo’s Hard Boiled, another film that simply kept raising the stakes until the screen could barely hold them. There are echoes of Eastern Promises too in the cold, ritualised business of an immigrant crime family. Set against its own predecessor the trade is plain: the first film had a perfect, propulsive simplicity this one cannot reach, but the set pieces here are more ambitious, more varied and arguably better staged.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are largely won over, sitting around 81%, with audiences a notch higher at 87%, and the split in the reviews is consistent. Almost everyone agrees the action is extraordinary; the reservations land on the story, which several find baggy and overextended after the lean machine of the original. That is a fair charge. There are stretches of gangland politics that exist mainly to get us to the next confrontation, and at 150 minutes the film asks for patience the first one never did. None of that touches the fights, which is where most viewers, myself included, are really keeping score.
Verdict
I came to this for the craft and the rewatchability, and on both it delivers. The choreography, the camerawork and the sheer physical commitment put it near the top of the modern action pile, and the prison and car-chase sequences are ones I will return to on their own. It loses a little against the first film on shape and momentum; the crime-epic ambition is admirable but the storytelling is the part that strains. As an action film it is close to faultless, and as a piece of film-making it is more interesting for reaching beyond its frame, even when its grasp slips. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: On limited release in UK cinemas now, with a DVD and Blu-ray release to follow. Seek out a screening if you can; the action plays best loud and large.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Iko Uwais and Gareth Evans’s partnership has only grown in stature, and Uwais went on to anchor The Night Comes for Us (2018), an even bloodier showcase that confirmed his standing as one of the genre’s defining performers. A long-mooted third film never materialised in the planned form, which leaves this as the closing chapter of the Raid story. It is now widely available on Blu-ray and digital, and streams on various platforms depending on region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 18 by the BBFC for strong bloody violence, gore. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are a number of protracted fight scenes, featuring the use of knives, guns and other weapons. One character uses claw hammers against her enemies. There are frequent gory images, during and in the aftermath of these fights.
Additional issues: There is also strong language (‘f**k’) and a sex scene.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
