On the one hand: The Raid 2: Berandal is bogged down with at least a half hour’s worth of superfluous material. One of The Raid‘s virtues was the lean and no-nonsense scope of its narrative. The sequel to Gareth Evans’s 2012 martial arts thriller is a two-and-a-half hour film that often busies itself with unnecessary tangents. The story is essentially every Asian action crime film trope melded together, what with the many imperious meetings of crime bosses, a third party manipulating two sides into a war, and meticulous plotting that collapses into utter chaos. In terms of story, Berandal is a step back from the simplicity of its predecessor.
On the other hand: Holy. Shit.
Berandal is a masterpiece of bodily injury. Director/editor Evans, co-editor Andi Novianto, and cinematographers Matt Flannery and Dimas Imam Subhono are working on an entirely different level here. The camerawork is unrestricted, following the brutality no matter how tight a space contains it. The lens is just shaky enough to lend extra oomph to the madness while still being visually coherent. The cutting is flawless, always letting the viewer know who is where in every single showdown.
And the fights! The fights! While The Raid was utterly badass, it became somewhat repetitive towards the end. Here, the ingenuity of harm escalates with every new sequence, which is quite a feat given that the movie is bone-crunching, flesh-ripping, face-caving-inning graphic from the start. No two fights are the same in terms of setting, moves used, or plot function. Unlike The Raid, which pitted Rama the silat master against a bunch of mooks and one martial arts equal, Berandal introduces a whole crew of characters with their own distinctive fighting styles. No two fighters are alike, and the movie is able to constantly mix things up.
Those characters are a big part of the appeal. There’s one guy who does amazing things with a baseball bat. There’s a girl who does even more amazing things with a pair of claw hammers. And then there’s the primary henchman, who possesses superhuman endurance and is quite adept with wickedly curved knives. They say little but feel more fleshed out than most of the main players in the plot.
Oh right, there’s a plot. Rama finds himself forced to work undercover in order to bring down the police bigwigs who are in the pockets of the local crime lords. He goes to prison to earn the trust of a gang boss’s son (Arifin Putra) and later finds himself as both the man’s friend and enforcer. But there’s something sinister afoot, as an ambitious underboss plots to instigate war between the two big cartels in the city. It’s very elaborate and dull, especially since all subtlety is eventually tossed out the window in favor of Rama waging a one-man war on crime. The first half in particular drags, cycling through rote character work on the way to more exciting action. The mole conceit is all but useless, since Rama is never put in danger of being discovered. In fact, Rama spends the majority of the film as a bystander to rather than an active participant in its events, another reason they feel so leaden.
Things pick up with a sequence in which various weapons specialists use their particular skills for a gruesome assassination. The film kicks into overdrive in the last third, boasting an insane car chase / shootout / close quarters brawl that would be the climax of most films, but then Berandal tops it. Then it tops it again. And again. It’s enthralling and exhilarating (and often wince-inducing), and has virtually no peer among modern action films.
There’s a two-hour version of The Raid 2 contained within its current cut that’s basically perfect. As it stands now, though, it’s a film that’s sometimes a slog that redeems itself through sheer badassery. I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of how many awesome physical maneuvers there are in this film. When it shuts up, it speaks volumes more.
