The Raid 2 – Still Brutal, Still Beautiful
I watched The Raid 2 again last night. It was two and a half hours long. By the time it ended I just sat for a moment. The violence doesn’t feel like movie violence. It feels heavy and real. I felt a little uncomfortable and exhausted but I think that’s exactly what makes this movie stick.
The movie moved slowly especially compared to the predecessor. Even the quiet scenes, people sitting in rooms, talking about deals and territory, felt like something was always about to go wrong. I didn’t mind the slow parts. I think I needed them.
The story continues right after the first film. Rama (Iko Uwais) made it out of that apartment building and I thought okay, maybe he gets a break now. He didn’t. He got pulled into something way bigger. Undercover work. Prison. Crime families. Politics between gangs. It felt less like an action movie and more like a crime drama. It reminded me more of a gangster film than anything else. The fights were almost secondary to everything else going on.
Arifin Putra played as Uco was someone I appreciated more on this rewatch. I think the first time I watched it I just saw him as the angry son. But there’s more going on. His father Bangun was careful, patient, and wanted to keep things stable. Uco wanted to grow, push harder, take more. And we could see it was eating him up inside. The way he reacted when his father shut down his ideas. The way he pushed for war with the Japanese gang felt less like a business decision and more like he just needed to prove something. I felt bad for him even when he was being terrible.
Yayan Ruhian came back in this one and I was a little nervous about that. In the first film he played as Mad Dog and that performance was so specific and so wild that I wasn’t sure how it would feel seeing him again as someone completely different. But it worked for me. In this movie he played a much quieter character called Prakoso. He was tired looking. Almost looks like a beggar.
There was a small scene where he stood outside a mall watching his wife and son from a distance and didn’t go to them. Just watched and left. That scene was maybe thirty seconds long and I think about it more than most of the fights. It made everything that happened to him later feel genuinely sad.
His nightclub fight was actually one of the most impressive things in the film. Bejo’s (one of the villain) men flooded in, the music stopped, and Prakoso just handled them. Chairs, bottles, his machete. One man against a whole room and he won. But he came out the other side already cut up and exhausted. And that’s when the Assassin was waiting for him in the alley. He had nothing left. That ending hit differently because of how hard he fought to get there. When it was over I just felt bad for him.
Then we got to Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man and it was brutal but also kind of strange. Baseball Bat Man actually lined up a real baseball and hit it directly into someone’s face at close range. I didn’t know whether to wince or laugh. I think I did both.
Hammer Girl was terrifying in a quieter way. She kept her weapons hidden until the last second and moved like she’d done this a thousand times. The hallway they fought in was so narrow that everyone was basically on top of each other. The camera didn’t try to hide anything. We saw all of it clearly. I actually appreciated that.
The kitchen fight after that was my favorite I think. And I looked it up after watching it because I was curious. Gareth Evans (the director) apparently spent six weeks designing that sequence alone. It took eight days to film. 195 shots. And honestly after watching it I kind of believe that. The Assassin came in almost relaxed at first, like he was giving Rama a chance. Then he pulled out the dual karambits and everything changed. Those blades are short which meant both of them had to stay uncomfortably close to each other the whole time. There was no room to breathe. Rama had nothing at the start and had to figure it out as he went.
The camera stayed wide for most of it so we could actually see everything clearly. No quick cuts to hide mistakes. Every kick, every slash, every moment where one of them gained the upper hand was right there in front of us. By the time it ended, around five or six minutes later, both of them were barely standing. It stopped feeling like a cool fight scene somewhere in the middle and started feeling like two people just trying to outlast each other by a few more seconds. That shift was what made it feel real.
The prison yard riot earlier in the film was also something else. Mud everywhere. Rain. Bodies everywhere. The camera moved through the crowd instead of just cutting around it and somehow I could still follow what was happening. I have no idea how they pulled that off.
I kept noticing how good the camerawork was throughout the whole film. It never felt like it was showing off. It just puts us in the right place at the right time. During the fights it stayed wide enough so we could see the full picture. No shaky cam. No rapid cuts to fake the intensity. The intensity was already there. The camera just let us watch it. Even in the car chase, it somehow moved between vehicles while everything was in motion and I never lost track of where anyone was. That kind of clarity in an action scene is rarer than people think.
And the sound design was something I started paying more attention to this time. The hits sounded real. Not that exaggerated Hollywood crunch but something heavier and duller and more uncomfortable. There were moments during the fights where the music just dropped completely and all we heard was breathing and footsteps and the sound of something hitting something that shouldn’t be hit. Those moments were somehow more unsettling than anything the score did. I think it was a deliberate choice and it worked really well. It kept reminding us that what we were watching was supposed to hurt.
The film was long. Some of the middle parts did drag a little, especially the conversations between the crime bosses. But I think without those scenes the violence would have felt empty. We needed to understand what everyone wanted and why before watching it all fall apart. And when it did fall apart it really did.
I don’t think The Raid franchise is for everyone. It’s long and brutal and some scenes are genuinely hard to sit through. But I keep coming back to it. There’s something about the way it was made that I really respect. It took its time. It trusted us to stay with it. And it gave us something that felt real and strange and sometimes almost beautiful.
Falling snow over Jakarta after two hours of mud and blood and claw hammers. Somehow that worked. I’m still not sure how.
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