Wick's Review

Summary - Good 3.0

Life is cheap in Jakarta. Guys get killed. Girls get, well, you know, treated disrespectfully in The Raid 2. The fun – this being a hell of a fun movie – comes from seeing how the guys get knocked off, as it’s often spectacularly inventive and/or a complete gross-out, with a body count that reaches into the triple digits.

Basically The Raid 2 is 2½ hours of near continuous killing in a hardbitten Cops & Corruption flick.

Guys get slaughtered in fantastically choreographed criminal battles, with endlessly inventive gross-outs. Once you realize you’re not going to be sick, you’ve got to laugh, out loud. LOL. Punches always get thrown in flurries of three, stabbings done in jackrabbit style, also in threes. Pop, pop, pop, sis, boom, bam.

Girls get used. Not on screen, but the kingpins and their henchmen consider females for entertainment value only. At least girls get to live, whereas the guys all get slaughtered. The whole thing goes medieval, with an emphasis on evil. Think crony capitalism run amok, sadly believable in a centrally controlled society.

The Raid 2 recalls Alan Mak & Wai-keung Lau’s classic blockbuster Infernal Affairs, with more than a little of the ultra from A Clockwork Orange thrown in. Writer-Director-Editor Gareth Evans pulls it off.

Check your human decency at the door and the movie is an improbable hoot. Another entertaining gross-out is always around the corner, with more inventive fight choreography following right after that. My crowd of largely San Jose State kids at a Camera 12 late show ate it up. Yours will too.

Acting - Good 3.0

Iko Uwais – 21st century martial arts moviestar – carries the movie. Also credited as Fight Choreographer, he’s in most scenes and no one else is in more than a handful, in part because most of them ultimately get knocked off. That’s not a spoiler, just how it is. Iko rocks: understated, undeterred and undefeated.

Supporters

• Julie Estelle as Hammer Girl, the sole female assassin.
• Yayan Ruhian as a feeble looking assassin.
• Arifin Putra as a Big Boss’s psychotic son. Putra’s pretty boy look would take him far in London.
• Tio Pakusodewo as the Big Boss man himself, a powerful politician & crime-lord.
• Alex Abbad as an aspiring crime boss who needs to take them down so he can rise to the top

Film - Very Good 3.5

Stock characters in action porn done to a high level of inventiveness, artistry and competence.

Body count in the hundreds. First, kingpins call out their lieutenants, who then throw their soldiers into one mass fight after another, in which they all get killed. Then the lieutenants ultimately meet grisly endings, followed by, yes, the major kingpins. Revealing this spoils nothing at all, as the plot’s purpose is simply to supply situations through which an endless stream of extraordinary fights to the death can keep coming all the way through 2½ hours of runtime.

BTW, don’t worry if you haven’t seen The Raid: Redemption. This sequel stands on its own.

Edge - Sordid 3.4

Sick, Sicker, Sickest = Sordid

Reality - Supernatural 3.5

Crony capitalism taken to the Nth degree. Government officials controlling an economy tend to control it for their personal benefit.

Set in today’s Indonesia, this revealing movie explores an exotic web of Indonesian, Chinese and Arab ethnicities.

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