Evans lacks the shorthand of a Coppola or a Scorsese, and he can’t quite juggle all these people and these subplots.īut Jesus, can this man direct an action scene. Now, with the new film’s sprawl of characters and betrayals, it’s hard to keep track of who’s stabbing whom in the back. The success of The Raid clearly bought Evans an insane amount of freedom, but the limitations of the first film’s concept gave it a linear simplicity, narrowing the director’s focus: Whenever there was a fight, you knew exactly what was at stake. If The Raid 2 falters seriously on any level, it is that, narratively speaking, this expansion of scale doesn’t quite work. I’ll stop right there with the story description, because I’m not sure how much of the rest of the plot I fully understood. Once they’re out, Rama, now called Yuda, finds himself a trusted henchman in the midst of a convoluted, low-boiling gang war full of elaborate double-crosses. And so, he spends four years (four years!) in prison, insinuating himself into the good graces of a major crime lord’s son. This time out, our hero Rama (Indonesian martial arts champion Iko Uwais), realizing his work is far from over - and he and his family far from safe - is asked to infiltrate the broader underworld in an effort to weed out corrupt cops and politicians as well as criminals. But the big screen is clearly where such explosive cinema belongs. It’s so sprawling that it feels like it could be a series.

If The Raid was a tight, tough, flawlessly executed action flick, The Raid 2, while almost equally amazing, is a diffuse, ambitious, flawed gangster ballet. If The Raid was mostly one guy fighting a bunch of other guys, The Raid 2 is many guys (and one exceptional gal) fighting each other in various head-spinning combinations. If The Raid took place over a couple of hours, The Raid 2 takes place over years. The Raid 2 opens almost precisely where the first one left off, but then quickly does away with the typical sequel idea of staging the same film in a different environment it abruptly, almost hilariously broadens its scope. Its simple, video-game-like conceit was that of a Jakarta cop stuck in a giant drug den apartment complex, being attacked by wave after wave of junkies and henchmen as he made his way to the main villains. Gareth Huw Evans’s The Raid, released in 2012 but already a modern action classic, was a bloody masterpiece of claustrophobic narrative economy. Watch The Raid 2 Online : Action | Crime | Thriller 2014

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