#The raid 2 berandal movie review full#
Uco gets out a while later, but it’s a full two years before Rama (now calling himself Yuda) is released, at which point he’s cautiously welcomed into Bangun’s employ. His superior forces him undercover, where Rama is to infiltrate one of Jakarta’s major crime families, gather information about the crooked cops on their payroll, and possibly settle a personal score with a limping but lethal baddie named Bejo (Alex Abbad).Īnd so Rama gets himself thrown in prison, where, after distinguishing himself in the first major setpiece - a satisfyingly visceral knock-down, drag-out brawl that finds inmates and police clashing in a muddy courtyard - he succeeds in earning the trust and respect of fellow prisoner Uco (Arifin Putra), the handsome, hotheaded son of formidable crime boss Bangun (Tio Pakusadewo). Having somehow made it out of “Redemption’s” house of horrors alive, kick-ass cop Rama ( Iko Uwais) soon learns his defeated opponents were merely pawns in a much bigger game, and he’ll have to disappear in order to avoid further persecution, and protect his wife and infant son. Rising exhausted from my seat when the closing credits rolled, I knew exactly how they felt.To the likely chagrin of some viewers, this time you actually have to pay a modicum of attention to the plot, a testosterone-driven tale of undercover cops and gang turf wars that crosses the existential despair of the “Infernal Affairs” trilogy with the brooding nihilism of a Takeshi Kitano yakuza picture. They could be revellers, nursing the sorest of heads on the morning after the night before. At the end of one apocalyptic battle, Rama retraces his steps back down through the basement where a group of punch-drunk survivors are writhing slowly on the ground, pawing gingerly at their bruises. It's in the mud of the prison yard or the din of the street in the blur of limbs and the balletic spin of bodies, when the picture shakes off its shackles to achieve a frantic kind of weightlessness, like one of those cartoon critters that runs off a cliff and pistons its legs to stay aloft. The plot line may be skimpy but the film's artistry lies elsewhere.
Yet Evans delivers the violence with such astonishing gusto that he barely lets us catch our breath. Of course it's preposterous and possibly reprehensible to boot a vast orchestration of sadism and sentiment. Rama fights on because he can, because he must, and because Evans persists in lining up his goons and sending them in single file – cranking the action so quickly that even the subtitles fall out of sequence, toiling desperately to keep pace. Who can say for certain? By around the midway mark, our hero has been subjected to so many double-crosses that it's a wonder he knows who he's fighting any more. On this occasion he has been ordered to infiltrate a crime cartel, or possibly two. Rama, it should be noted, is a master of the Indonesian martial art of "pencak silat", a one-man killing machine who can take out entire armies, providing the army obliges by running at him one man at a time. Iko Uwais is back in business as the redoubtable Rama, sent deep cover into the underworld of Jakarta. The movie's menu of carnage reads as long as your arm.Įvil-doers beware, for you have no place left to hide. If Evans never actually goes so far as to throw in the kitchen sink as well, he does at least find room for an extended sequence in which a man's face is sauteed on a hot-plate.
It puts its characters to the sword, to the shotgun, and to the speeding automobile.
The Raid 2: Berandal ups the ante to give us riots in the prison and battles in the bar a girl wielding hammers and a boy brandishing a bat. Now along comes the sequel, which only goes to show that nothing succeeds like excess. T he writer-director Gareth Evans was raised in Wales, moved to Indonesia in his 20s and rustled up a left-field hit with 2011's The Raid, in which a rookie cop knocked seven bells out of the gangsters infesting a nightmarish block of flats.