The Raid 2 - Berandal

Hammerer Shy

The Raid 2 - Berandal 
(aka The Raid - Berandal aka 
The Raid 2 aka The Raid: Retaliation)
2014 Indonesia
Directed by Gareth Evans
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Very slight spoilers concerning the nature of some of the action choreography... if you count that as a spoiler... and the set up of the movie.

There’s a lot that could have gone wrong with Gareth Evans follow up to his hugely successful action move The Raid (reviewed here). One would have been the idea that you had to top the action sequences of the first movie to give the audiences all even more of the same multiplied by ten. The second would be to continue the structure of the first film in that you have it set in one location over a small number of hours.

I’m happy to say that, with The Raid 2 - Berandal, Evans not only doesn’t fall into either of those traps... but he also delivers another adrenalin fuelled, kick ass action movie which holds up on its own with its own agenda. Actually, that’s a bit of a double edged sword in some ways because there are certain characters from the first film you want to know about... but maybe they’ll get to that in a future installment.

And, to get any raised eyebrows out of the way on that last paragraph... yes, the action sequence choreography and editing in this movie is absolutely spectacular... but it stands up as being equal, not necessarily better than the sequences in the first movie. It does its own thing and as I sat watching this in the Cineworld Haymarket at the weekend, I could feel the collective pulse of the audience speeding up at the sheer, gruelling intensity of the combat sequences in this one.

Starting a mere two hours after the events of the first film, rather than continue the thread which that film left open, the fate of Rama’s brother and the family bond that tied them together on separate sides of the law, this story absolutely ignores that and uses the fallout of the events of the first movie to kick start a different plot involving the main protagonist Rama (again played with huge amounts of energy by Iko Uwais) deliberately serving time in prison to set himself up in an undercover operation. And, of course, as soon as this is fully explained, through use of cross cutting to flashbacks and the camera recording Rama’s current prison environment, the action starts to take over... with a beautiful sequence set in a prison toilet cubicle, where Rama takes on a larger number of people then could effectively fit in such a place. We’ve seen these claustrophobic kinds of fight scenes before (most notably in Danny The Dog aka Unleashed with Jet Li) and it kind of harkens back in terms of film history to the fight between Sean Connery and Robert Shaw in the train compartment in From Russia With Love... but this is a truly dynamic sequence and it's only the first action piece in the film.

This opening punch up is followed up with another, truly memorable fight sequence, which is set in the muddy prison courtyard, straight away recalling to mind, at least to this member of the audience, the final rain and mud soaked battle in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. Then the film jumps ahead two years and the hero is propelled into the outside world, having infiltrated the criminal organisation which puts him right where the chief of the special police unit in charge of such matters wants him.

The film is impressive in many ways and it’s not just the action sequences which require your appreciation. The style of the camera work, with long, slow zooms and pans as the intent of the major players are revealed in scenes involving dialogue, rather than lots of punching and kicking, are quite sedately paced and this is a smart move by a director who values the effect of having long gaps and moments of rest between the action. It’s a good thing to do if you want the raw energy of those sequences to stand out even more and it’s something a lot of masters of cinema have realised over the years.  Evans has got this clocked and the way he utilises the tension and release of the frenetically paced action rubbing visual styles with the serene moments of potential energy, before they become kinetic energy unleashed in some of the most painful and bone crunching ways, is surely a sign that this director is not just a flash in the pan and an artist worthy of your time.

And talking about tension and release... there’s a really clever piece of playing around with the audiences expectations and the moment of visceral, shock imagery when its least expected. It’s become, very much, a cliché in horror movies to make the audience think that something is about to happen and then giving them the old double bluff relief when a character goes to investigate something potentially scary and it turns out to be a false alarm (more often than not in the form of an errant cat)... before the main protagonist turns around, slap bang into the scary thing that the audience was hyped about seeing before it turned out to be a false alarm. It’s an old trick but it’s still used because it takes people unawares.

What Gareth Evans does is to take the same basic principal, but use it as a sucker punch to the suspense of a specifically nasty piece of violence unfolding before your eyes. To explain... like the first movie, The Raid 2 has a lot of violence which is implied by cutting away at the exact moment it happens and allowing the audience to imagine the worst. To be fair, it also has loads of violence which is full on bloody and brutal and witnessed in full, but in certain sequences Evans pulls away and lets the imagination take over. Now then, there’s a scene in this movie where three “specialists” in one criminal organisation, are taking out key players in a rival gang’s organisation and the three action sequences are cross cut with each other to make a lengthy action montage...

And this is where Evans does something really special...

In one sequence, a major villain has got his victim held down by two of his men and he is about to burrow down hard into a man’s head with a pick axe or some sharp object. You know it’s coming and you know it’s gonna be nasty. We see the object come down and... the director cuts away. But this is the beauty of it... he cuts back to a continuing sequence where a specialist martial artist who should perhaps best be known as ‘hammer girl’ is bashing and clawing her way through a load of men and, a second or two after he has cut away from the head shot, we see her bring a claw hammer down through a man’s head in exactly the way we were threatened with in the previous shot. So we get, tension, release as in the “oh good, we didn’t actually see it” and then we see the act itself after all, but via a different set of characters and a different instrument of ‘head bashery’.... which is then itself numbed out because the sequence is continuing on with more unstoppable and driven action fighting which forces us to pay attention and file away the moment in the back of our minds as we look at everything else that’s going on. This was pretty clever and I don’t remember it being done quite this way in a movie before. I almost clapped out loud at the arrogance of it. All good stuff.

The film is quite good looking and, when you’re not being edited to death at a ferocious pace (which is in no way incomprehensible at any point, in case you were worried about that aspect), there are some quite nice sets...many of which are decorated in red, I noticed. They catch the eye and hold the attention as the actors do their thing.

My only real puzzlement is that there are a couple of spectacular action sequences starring actor Yayan Ruhian, who played such a major bad guy role in the first film, which ended with his character’s death at the hands of Rama and his brother. Here, he plays a different character but, for some reason, he looks almost exactly the same as he did in the first film. He’s got such a recognisable face that I wondered why he’s in this one. It actually pulled both my friend and I out of the action for a few seconds as we tried to work out if he was playing a twin brother to the previous character or some such thing. Don’t get me wrong, I can see why a martial artist of such skill could only be beneficial to have as a person on set... but it was a strange move, I thought.

All in all, though, this in no way detracts from the basic scenario and I’m happy that The Raid 2 - Berandal differs so much from the first film in terms of the wealth of changing locations, the amount of time the story takes place in and the fact that there is generally more story to it, as opposed to the very simple set up of the first one. Bearing in mind the way this film ends... which I’m not going to reveal or spoil here... I’m now very much looking forward to seeing where the director takes us from here. It’s quite obvious that he’s not done with these characters yet and I truly can’t wait to see the next installment. For fans of action movies, I can only recommend this as being a definite must see to add to your list. There is much kickassery in this movie.

The Raid (aka The Raid: Redemption)

Raiding Places


The Raid 
aka The Raid: Redemption 
aka Serbuan Maut
Indonesia/USA 2011 Directed by Gareth Evans
Now showing in UK cinemas.

Kick-asstacular.

That’s the word I think I’d use to describe The Raid, if I had a choice. But I can’t really because... well you know... it’s not actually a word.

Okay I really did know what that last sentence was going to lead on to, I promise... there was going to be an open bracket at the end of word and then the sentence... “quickly checks the Urban Dictionary to make sure kickasstacular isn’t a word in common usage”. That’s where my opening paragraph fell down here folks... as I’m afraid I did just check the Urban Dictionary and it turns out “Kickasstacular” is already in common usage... see here.

Okay, so carrying on as if nothing has happened...

There are only a few films that I can think of, off of the top of my head, that I would consider to be in the kinetic realm of the kickasstacular. That is to say, action movies which are so fast and ferocious that you get almost an adrenalin rush just sitting and watching them from your seat. Of recent cinema history I can only think of the following: the first District 13 (Banlieue 13) movie, Danny The Dog (aka Unleashed) and the first Ong Bak movie. These are pretty much it in terms of the modern contemporaries of this movie... at least as far as I’m concerned.

Written and directed by a Welsh man living in Indonesia, The Raid has garnered solid reviews for being the absolute state-of-the-art in modern action movies and, after seeing it this weekend, I can see why. It’s not exactly non-stop and the action sequences are, quite competently, tempered with a few breathers from the blisteringly paced editing on show throughout the majority of this movie. What singles it out from the films I listed above, however, is not the discovery that the action sequences are in any way more spectacular than those films... because they’re not. The one thing The Raid has working both for and against it is the fact that the three films listed above had some definitive moments of humour to help balance the action sequences and to give the audience a bit of a rest... The Raid, however, is perfectly (or imperfectly, depending on your personal viewpoint) humourless. Instead of pacing the movie out with classic moments of comic relief, the movie fills in the non-action scenes with a grim, dark suspense that, in some cases, becomes almost too unbearable to watch.
Update: Please see the comment left below by Zanirma which explains the moments of humour in this film and highlights the issues of things getting lost in translation. Brilliant comment.

This does give it a less over-the-top feel for a little while but, after some time has passed, there’s a point about a third of the way into the film when you think, no men could take this kind of punishment this consistently and not get tired and, while there is a sequence after a major fight scene where the director has tried to address this “longevity” issue somewhat, it’s pretty obvious that, by this point, you’ve entered the unpredictable world of the OTT action-versus-science school of film-making. But, also by this point, the audience members are probably beginning to feel a little punch drunk themselves, so they’re possibly not going to notice too much.

The Raid concerns itself with a police raid on a block of flats filled with a criminal community and protected by various traps to stop such a thing happening in the first place. The police team need to get to the top and take out the “boss man” (I’m realising as I’m typing this that Bruce Lee might well approve, since this is a very similar concept to what he originally wanted Game Of Death to be). The plot is simple (and one of the policemen briefing his men in the van journey to The Raid also acknowledges this in a little dialogue nod to the audience)... but it’s not so simple that there aren’t a few, admittedly obvious, twists along the way. The character who turns out to be the real lead hero of the film, for example, has his own agenda for being there and, quite apart from that, there are questions also raised once the shooting starts as to whether The Raid has been officially sanctioned or not. I don’t want to give too much away here so that’s the last I’ll say about plot details... but there is a lightweight (admittedly) intelligence to the story which pulls this above most of the other big screen action fests doing the rounds these days. Not much, to be sure, but certainly enough to raise it above the heads of others.

Also, although the action is quite exhaustingly driven and paced, for the most part the editing does not work against the sequences it’s trying to portray. You will surely understand the geography and choreography of the combat sequences as they are happening and not as some kind of delayed, what-just-happened response which you will need to concentrate on to cobble together in your mind after the fact.

That being said, I did notice a few continuity errors throughout the film, the major one for me being when the main protagonist (such as he becomes) head butts one of the less deliberately cardboard of the villains so hard that the bad guys eyeball explodes with a bloody pop. In the rest of the fight, however, the guy just seems a bit squinty and there is no blood on his face. I’m completely forgiving this as an enthusiastic insert-shot-after-the-fact on what must have been some very hard to shoot action sequences, however, and the very fact that I could even comprehend what I just saw under these kinds of ultra-lightning cut sequences is probably a testimony to the strength of the editing on this one.

And that was it... my one and only negative piece of criticism of The Raid. 

I think it’s a really great little action movie and the success it’s receiving is very much deserved and ensures that this will now continue on as a franchise... the next two parts in a planned extension to a trilogy already being plotted out, it seems. This movie does leave a few questions hanging in the air as to the nature and origins of just went on, to be fair, and my one hope for continuing the series is that the second and third parts don’t try to repeat the formula too much and we don’t end up with more “blocks of flats” movies... they’ve already done that as good as it will get in this one.

So if you like a hefty dose of anxiety inducing, pulse pounding, action cinema... The Raid is a cinematic block of flats that’s right up your street. I’m not sure how long a subtitled movie from Indonesia is going to be staying around at the cinemas though, so you’d best get out and watch it while you can. You won’t be sorry.