The Raid 2 (Iko Uwais) – Movie Review

Iko Uwais is back as Jakarta cop Rama in Welsh director Gareth Evans’s astounding, pounding, scalding epic Indonesian gangster movie sequel to the 2011 blockbuster. Two and a half hours of serious, full-on non-stop action, it’s as bone-crunchingly thrilling as it is eye-poppingly stylish.

This time, in a story that takes place a short time after the first raid but is largely unconnected to it, Rama needs to protect his infant son and wife, and is forced to go undercover among the lowlife thugs of Jakarta to bust open a whole panorama of evil.

It’s arranged that Rama is sent to a hellhole jail, where he ingratiates himself with the vicious, renegade young son Ucok (Arifin Putra) of the boss of a crime syndicate. Freed from prison after two years, Rama is met at the gates by Ucok, taken to see his smoothly sinister Godfather-style dad Bangun (Tio Pakusodewo) and recruited into the syndicate, largely run as a regular business with board meetings. Then Rama’s troubles really begin, as he finds himself trapped in a tangle of corruption from competing forces, corrupt politicians and the police alike. All he can do is fight his way out.

Cue some of the most awesome action committed to screen. It starts as it means to finish, with a prison yard showdown that’s going to save the Indonesian tax-payer a lot of money by about halving the jail population, There’s a lot of CGI trickery, as the action plays out like a series of video games, but it doesn’t intrude on the action.

Uwais may be small and look sweet, but boy can he fight! Think Jackie Chan 30 years ago. He’s a brilliantly effective presence, and so are the silkily creepy, inner raging Putra and Alex Abbad as the limping crime boss Bejo, with dark glasses and a stick.

Evans takes it at a relentless pace, with one damned action sequence following another with hardly a gap. The imaginatively set rumbles move from a warehouse, to the inside of a BMW, to an industrial kitchen, to a nightclub, to an alleyway to a tube train and so on. And this time he chucks in an amazing car chase for extra value. It’s a big highlight of the movie.

The story is unsurprising, the dialogue basic, the characters from hand-me-down old stock. It’s a conventional, familiar, even archetypal story. Bits of it seem to come from old James Cagney movies, other bits from The Departed. But that doesn’t matter at all. It’s what you do with this story that counts. And Evans knows just how to make it come up fresh and thrilling – er just go to the action and pile the bodies high.

You pretty much well know that the hammers wielded by Julie Estelle’s character (Hammer girl) must be made of foam rubber, but it doesn’t stop her being very, very scary. And there’s also an evil henchman whose idea of a good time is killing people with a baseball bat and some baseballs.

The poster says ‘one of the greatest action movies ever made’. Even allowing for a bit of hyperbole and plain over-statement and exaggeration, it’s real easy to go with that. Anyone who loves gangster movies will be in heaven in The Raid 2. How can you not be intoxicated and amazed?

(C) Derek Winnert 2014 derekwinnert.com