The Raid 2 (2014)
Directed by Gareth Evans
After fighting his way through an apartment building populated by an army of dangerous criminals and escaping with his life, SWAT team member Rama goes undercover, joining a powerful Indonesian crime syndicate to protect his family and uncover corrupt members of his own force.
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37 films that influenced The Raid 2
What critics say influenced The Raid 2
I know it sounds like fault-finding or nit-picking to note the borrowed-bits plot here; one sequence echoes, strongly, the five families wipeout from “The Godfather,” while there are also nods to “Game of Death” and a general air of John Woo-esque loyalty-vs-law themes.
If you're looking for a crime epic in the vein of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather or Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honour or Humanity , you might find it a fairly unoriginal exercise.
Whereas the first film had all the lean, mean efficiency of the original Die Hard, the new film cribs from every major gangster film of the last forty years, creating an unwieldy two and a half hour amalgamation of The Godfather, The Departed and Eastern Promises.
As the stakes rise he comes off like Fredo from The Godfather, if Fredo were a complete sociopath.
A hotchpotch of Infernal Affairs and The Godfather , it may not be narratively original, but it’s bolstered by a host of dramatic performances that grip as easily as the action.
What hurts The Raid 2 is not so much this sort of by-the-numbers plotting – The Raid was similarly slight on story – but its pretensions towards being some sort of The Godfather-with-roundhouse-kicks crime epic.
Self-congratulatory types may observe The Raid 2: Berandal in terms of its smorgasbord of cinematic influences, and pat themselves on the back for catching its touchstones: the A Better Tomorrow and Infernal Affairs trilogies, the filmography of Johnnie To, The Godfather: Part II, maybe even a little The Untouchables.
An ill-advised use of Handel's stately "Sarabande" will either bring to mind Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon or trigger unintentional laughs at the unearned somberness.
And there are art cinema gestures, like the scene scored to Handel's Sarabande in D Minor, better-known as the main theme from Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon.
Apart from the brief use of the “Sarabande” from Handel’s “Suite in D minor,” which may jerk your thoughts toward “Barry Lyndon” (or not), the soundtrack is essentially a wall of percussion that mirrors the pummeling, metronomic rhythms of the action.
Shot with a sleek geometry, the father-son business dynamic is regarded as if it had the gravity of Barry Lyndon; a particularly treacherous assassination sequence even quotes that movie’s use of Handel’s “Sarabande.”
The score by Joseph Trapanese, Aria Prayogi and Fajar Yuskemal is so propulsive that when one scene is suddenly accompanied by the Handel sarabande familiar from “Barry Lyndon,” the effect is almost giddily amusing.
Quentin Tarantino’s two Kill Bills are clearly referenced/homaged, as are the original Oldboy, the movies of Sam Peckinpah, the Infernal Affairs films (which served as the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed) and the earlier Hong Kong thrillers made by John Woo, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam (particularly the A Better Tomorrow movie trilogy).
(You may be reminded of “The Departed” and its Hong Kong inspiration, “Infernal Affairs.”)
In a plot vaguely reminiscent of “The Departed” and “Infernal Affairs,” the Hong Kong crime drama on which it was based, Rama goes undercover as Yuda inside a Jakarta crime family, where he encounters Japanese Yakuza and corrupt members of the Jakarta police.
If this sounds like the Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs (Americanized by Martin Scorsese as The Departed ), well, who's complaining?
It’s apparent that Berandal takes too many cues from Infernal Affairs and Martin Scorsese’s remake The Departed.
So of course he says no! Because when some guy you’ve never met before shows up with a mustache and tries to pitch you the same “you-won’t-paid-like-a-regallah-coughp” idea Martin Sheen talked Leonardo DiCaprio into in The Departed, you say no.
Funnily enough, it reminded me most of all of Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, which I also didn't like.
Quentin Tarantino’s two Kill Bills are clearly referenced/homaged, as are the original Oldboy, the movies of Sam Peckinpah, the Infernal Affairs films (which served as the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed) and the earlier Hong Kong thrillers made by John Woo, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam (particularly the A Better Tomorrow movie trilogy).
In a plot vaguely reminiscent of “The Departed” and “Infernal Affairs,” the Hong Kong crime drama on which it was based, Rama goes undercover as Yuda inside a Jakarta crime family, where he encounters Japanese Yakuza and corrupt members of the Jakarta police.
What plot that follows is a series of reveals and reversals that borrow liberally from Hong Kong action films (Infernal Affairs, in particular), but really, all that is secondary to the film’s endlessly inventive action set-pieces, which are kinetically shot and meticulously paced like mini three-act operas.
Self-congratulatory types may observe The Raid 2: Berandal in terms of its smorgasbord of cinematic influences, and pat themselves on the back for catching its touchstones: the A Better Tomorrow and Infernal Affairs trilogies, the filmography of Johnnie To, The Godfather: Part II, maybe even a little The Untouchables.
If this sounds like the Hong Kong classic Infernal Affairs (Americanized by Martin Scorsese as The Departed ), well, who's complaining?
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Quentin Tarantino’s two Kill Bills are clearly referenced/homaged, as are the original Oldboy, the movies of Sam Peckinpah, the Infernal Affairs films (which served as the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed) and the earlier Hong Kong thrillers made by John Woo, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam (particularly the A Better Tomorrow movie trilogy).
Each geyser of blood gets its own glamor-lighting, lending the depravity a balletic opulence that insinuates that Evans really just wanted to create a splatter-house adaptation of "Miami Vice" or John Woo's "A Better Tomorrow" series.
At their best, face-offs in the first film brought to mind the fluid, balletic destruction of prime John Woo, particularly Hard Boiled , and select set-pieces in the follow-up do impress.
With The Raid 2 Evans has escalated action filmmaking the same way that the gun fu classics The Killer and Hard Boiled did back at the turn of the 1990s.
With The Raid 2 Evans has escalated action filmmaking the same way that the gun fu classics The Killer and Hard Boiled did back at the turn of the 1990s.
For the last decade, the action genre has been divided into four distinct sub categories: the superhero movie (The Avengers, The Dark Knight), the “geriatrics with guns” movie (The Expendables, Taken), the arty martial arts movie (The Grandmaster, Red Cliff) and the ever popular shaky cam thriller (The Bourne movies, Safe House).
Notable highlights include a freewheeling and visceral 30 to 40-person prison-yard brawl, a thrillingly crafted, bone-crunchingly destructive car chase, a wryly funny trio of gangland assassinations, and a tense, violently balletic kitchen-based finale that echoes Bruce Lee’s unfinished masterpiece Game Of Death (by way of a particularly narked-off Gordon Ramsay).
Writer/director Gareth Evans is, in a sense, one of those new cinema artists akin to Quentin Tarantino in his “Reservoir Dogs” salad days.
Impersonating "The Departed," "Donnie Brasco," "Reservoir Dogs," etc., Rama goes undercover to locate the mobsters responsible for his brother's murder and disassemble them using only his fists.
In one of the cutaways, such as they are, from all the undercover tension, we meet the mesmerizing “Hammer Girl” (Julie Estelle), a sundress-clad assassin who could pass for Uma Thurman’s “Kill Bill” stand-in.
What matters is a machete-wielding contract killer, a pair of baddies who kill with baseball equipment and hammers, respectively (the latter character is named "Hammer Girl," say what), and all the sound and fury that is delivered with such a relentlessly straight face and gritted teeth that Tarantino's "Kill Bill" pictures look like "The Gang's All Here" by comparison.
Production design with its greens and blues is often reminiscent of the stylish but abhorrent "Only God Forgives," cinematography sometimes seems death defying and sound is visceral.
Two particularly nasty assassins, the aptly named Baseball Bat Man (Very Tri Yulisman) and Hammer Girl (Julie Estelle), feel straight out of the Tarantino playbook, particularly in a climactic endgame whose red-walled production design seems to be channeling “Only God Forgives.”
Ranging from brutal to cruel to savage to neo-nihilist, “The Raid 2” is even a few choreographed steps beyond the dour, dim canvas of Refn’s “Only God Forgives.”
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For example, last year's shocking documentary The Act of Killing, a Denmark/Norway/UK production directed by American Joshua Oppenheimer, combined bloodletting and farce in its account of unrepentant paramilitary killers boasting of their slaughter of Indonesian "communists" in the 1960s.
Though directed by a filmmaker from Wales, Gareth Evans (who has just done the new Godzilla film), the Raid series is set in Indonesia, the location for the recent documentary The Act of Killing, about memories of murder.
Korea’s Man From Nowhere, Paul Greengrass’s Bourne movies, Christopher Nolan’s Batman, Donnie Yen’s Sha Po Lang and Flashpoint, Tony Jaa’s Ong Bak films which have progressively jettisoned their humor until all that remains is two men beating the crap out of each other.