Though pretty much everyone Rama encounters is a bad guy, his sense of duty keeps him on the job, dispatching the worst of the creeps with speed and savagery. But as with the first film, The Raid 2 ultimately comes down to situational ethics. The film’s message is that crime is so pervasive that no aspect of modern society remains unaffected. While The Raid distilled the martial-arts genre to a series of small-scale, violent encounters, The Raid 2 expands Rama’s playing field to include muddy prison yards, shady clubs, vice-packed warehouses, and corporate boardrooms. When Rama gets out of jail, he becomes an enforcer in Bangun’s organization, periodically reporting back to his possibly corrupt superiors on the police force about the underworld’s internal power struggles, which are about to touch off a citywide gang war.
At the start of The Raid 2, Rama is ordered to abandon his family-the people for whom he took this job in the first place-and go undercover in prison, so he can cozy up to Ucok (Arifin Putra), the son of the biggest boss in Jakarta, Bangun (Tio Pakusodewo). Iko’s Rama returns, no longer as an underestimated rookie, but recognized by his superiors as a hyper-effective crime-fighting weapon. It’s meant to make a crowded theater go “Oof!” in unison, then chuckle with shared pleasure.Įvans’ The Raid 2 ups the level of ambition without substantially deepening the premise. But The Raid isn’t the kind of movie meant to draw in the audience with a complex plot and strong emotional underpinnings. As Rama works his way up the building floor by floor, like a videogame hero, he’s confronted with surprise attacks and unwelcome revelations, and reveals secrets of his own. Set almost entirely in one location, The Raid is essentially one long fight scene, as a young cop named Rama (played by pencak silat champion Iko Uwais) joins his colleagues in an unauthorized, unceasing assault on a crimelord-controlled apartment. Gareth Evans’ 2011 thriller The Raid: Redemption won action fans’ favor because it was so refreshingly unadulterated.
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