Sleazy grandeur

Among the innumerable kick-punching pleasures of the martial arts mash-up The Raid 2 is the way that it photocopies the bone-crunching karate horror of the low-budget 2011 original while simultaneously expanding the universe into a languorous crime epic. Made in Indonesia by Welsh writer-director Gareth Evans, The Raid: Redemption was a claustrophobic potboiler set almost entirely within a single apartment building. The Raid 2 immediately (and somewhat hilariously) digresses from that aesthetic in the opening image, a God’s-eye-view wide shot of a serene open field.

Evans also violently dispatches with two major characters from The Raid: Redemption in the first few minutes (suck it, ambivalent ending!), offering an ambitious story arc that spans several years, rather than several flights of stairs. And yet the show-stopping fight scenes of the original are if anything amplified here, and are mostly announced with an operatic fanfare worthy of a Sergio Leone gunfight. The success of Evans’ ballsy vision suggests that he has the chops to also direct romantic comedies, costume dramas, and jukebox musicals where everyone beats the living shit out of each other.

Iko Uwais returns from the first film to play Rama, the one morally upright cop left in Jakarta, who also happens to be a whirling dervish of righteous, blood-spilling mayhem. As depicted in these two films, Indonesian cities are surprisingly unmarred by gun violence, and yet are teeming hotbeds of machete, baseball-bat, hammer, and crazy curved-knife violence. Perhaps Evans is just falling back on martial-arts and comic-book clichés here, but after watching The Act of Killing, I will believe literally anything about the country of Indonesia.

After surviving the immense carnage of the original, Rama is recruited into a rogue police department tasked with rooting out dirty cops. He goes deep undercover as a prisoner in order to befriend the son of a crime boss, and, naturally, his incarceration leads directly into two of the most intimately over-the-top fight scenes in film history (one in a bathroom stall, one in a giant mud puddle). Evans and Uwais stage these hyperbolic hand-to-hand combat sequences with a ruthless, almost hallucinatory perfection—this is what a Busby Berkeley movie would have looked like had he been a sadist instead of a pervert.

The only major knock on The Raid 2 is a surprising one. In its attempt to fit state-of-the-art, video-game-style fight sequences into the frame of a weighty existential crime film, The Raid 2 becomes a little too familiar. Evans is less accomplished with dialogue than he is with staging glorious fight scenes, and the characters aren’t distinctive enough to sustain the dramatic momentum. This is especially a problem in the second act, when Evans resorts to something as conventional as a car chase, although even there the emphasis is on bodily rather than vehicular mutilation.

But familiarity is a minor criticism for a movie with such insane ambition, and the demonic glee that Evans feels in unpacking his model train set of cinematic influences is palpable. The most obvious points of reference for the sleazy grandeur of The Raid 2 are 1970s crime films such as The Yakuza and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, as well as their 1990s offspring, like Reservoir Dogs and Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. However, Evans’ palette is also rich enough to allow for references to slasher films (one fight scene set in a kitchen splatters more blood than most horror franchises), Barry Lyndon, There Will Be Blood, and the speed-freak noir of Japanese filmmaker Seijun Suzuki.

Alternating between jaw-dropping fight sequences and a gnarled, lurid drama of shifting loyalties, Evans stretches the film into 150 minutes of borderline Zack Snyder-esque much-too-muchness. I am reasonably certain that the film ends only because Rama kicks literally every person in Indonesia to death. Still, The Raid 2 is strangely compact as drama, with a malicious application of Chekhov’s rule: If you see a character casually carrying a couple of hammers, rest assured that it won’t be long before those hammers are used to mutilate and disembowel humans in every manner imaginable.