I Watch Films: The Raid 2

The Raid 2

Fresh from his adventures in The Raid, Rama is sent to go undercover in the Jakarta underworld. To his dismay this starts with a 2-year stint in prison where he attracts the attention of the son of a gang boss by fighting a lot of men in a toilet, refusing to join him, then (probably?) defending him in a giant confusing muddy brawl in the prison yard.

They get out. Uco, the son and heir of Bangun, who controls half of Jakarta’s crime, is being employed by his father as basically a debt collector. Rama joins him, only to find that Uco thinks he should be doing more, Bangun is too cautious.

Rama wants out as he has evidence on all the gang’s activities, but he’s there to find their connection with the corrupt police, and he’s not got that. Uco makes an alliance with another criminal Bejo, who walks with a cane and has a dramatic looking restaurant, the kind of place that makes a cool backdrop for tense conversations, giving orders to weirdo assassins, and maybe an ultimate fight scene. Bejo and Uco try to start a war between their gang and Goto’s, the gang that controls the other half of Jakarta, and this spirals into the final sequence of car chases and fights.

The Raid was a very focused film, three actual characters on each side, one building, one day. This dilutes that. It turns out that every gangster in Jakarta has a couple of weird hitmen as well about a hundred suicidal gang members who will fight to the death at the slightest opportunity. There are multiple buildings filled with people who are ready to fight. The film takes place over several years, and even if we consider the prison scenes as prologue, over several months.

There’s a lot of good stunts.

Watch This: Tense gangster flick with extraordinary fight sequences
Don’t Watch This: No matter the spectacular stunts, it’s just guys betraying each other