My nephews were visiting last week, and the older boy (age 15) was interested in seeing some older (to him) movies. Being a movie guy, I was more than happy to accommodate him. He got to see Sonic the Hedgehog, the original King Kong, Die Hard, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and John Carpenter’s take on The Thing. Most of these were his choices based on my recommendations. I for the most part did not watch these movies with him. I have seen them before, and my cat Silvia was not taking it too well that there were strangers in the apartment, so I would spend those moments with her and keeping her calm. But then one night while looking for Terminator 2, I saw that HBO Max had The Raid, and I told my nephew that he was going to watch that one, and this time I would join him. That turned out to be his favorite movie of the entire batch. So much so, that two nights later, he selected The Raid 2, which I hadn’t seen. Again, I watched it with him.
Coming in at nearly an hour longer than the first Raid, we had some high hopes…even if for some reason, HBO Max only had the movie dubbed into Spanish. That was mildly distracting. But how was the rest of the movie?
Police officer Rama (Iko Uwais) was one of three cop survivors of the first movie. The other two were a badly injured colleague and the dirty lieutenant who led the assault. Rama was told which honest cops he could go to. His hurt colleague got medical attention. The corrupt lieutenant got a bullet to the head. Will Rama help bring down more corrupt cops by infiltrating a gang? He will though he isn’t entirely comfortable with the methods employed by his new superiors. He may have good reason to as a new gang boss, unbeknownst to Rama, has just executed Rama’s criminal brother Andi, another survivor of the first movie.
To get in good, Rama under the alias of Yuda goes to prison for assaulting a politician’s son and meets the son of the gang’s boss, Uco (Arifin Putra). He befriends and protects Uco well enough to get a personal invite to join Uco’s father Bangun’s (Tio Pakusadewo) gang. That comes after two years in prison, during which Rama’s wife has been raising their child alone. However, Rama needs to walk a careful tightrope. Uco is petulant and volatile. Bangun is a survivor. Both men are dangerous for different reasons, and they aren’t exactly seeing eye-to-eye at times. Factor in as well that Andi’s killer has his own thing going on, and Rama will need more than his incredible martial arts skills to survive this one.
OK, cards on the table, this was not what I was looking for in a Raid movie. For one thing, there’s arguably no raid. For another, after the nearly nonstop action of the first movie, a movie where the main character has to investigate corruption without getting caught is a whole different sort of movie. To be fair, there are a number of highly impressive fight scenes in the movie, as well as a couple of very, shall we say, colorful assassins running around, including one played by the first movie’s Yayan Ruhian which made me wonder for a moment if the original movie’s Mad Dog had somehow survived the fight, but this one was a very different character. However, these fight scenes are much more spaced out as a lot of the movie is Rama’s investigation, Uco’s plotting, and whatever else is going on. As great as the fight scenes still are, this is not a nearly non-stop action movie like the first one.
Which is not to say it’s bad. I like Uwais and wish he got some decent American work once in a while, and many of the action scenes in this movie are far and away cooler than the first movie’s. It’s just that I came in expecting an action movie and got an action movie spliced with a police corruption story. It just was not what I was wanting out of a Raid movie. Still, when the movie went into action mode, it was everything I wanted in a Raid movie. I just wish those scenes weren’t so spread apart.
Grade: B
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