Though its full title is The Raid 2: Berandal, Gareth Evans’ sequel to his 2011 beat-to-a-pulp-a-thon, The Raid: Redemption, could just as easily be called The Raid: Unfettered. While the hyper-violent martial arts maiming moments will elicit about the same number of appreciative chuckles as the first, in his new film, Evans has cast off the spatial and temporal constraints that so defined his earlier effort. The Raid: Redemption can be viewed as a single, extended action set piece. Shorn of pretty much everything else but the action, the plot unfolds in a brisk 101 minutes as an elite police unit tries to dislodge a crime lord from his 15-story, henchman-infested apartment building (and then tries to survive when the attempt goes awry). Meanwhile, The Raid 2 spans more than three years and spreads the pummeling, slashing and occasional hammer-time throughout myriad locations. (The film puts on about 50 minutes in the process.) As a result, Evans’ latest unwittingly serves as the converse of the adage, “Less is more.” More, it turns out, is indeed less—though not by much, and not to an extent that is likely to bother fans of the original. In fact, though the addition of “extras” like multiple locations, a larger cast of non-fodder characters and oh, actual dialogue, makes The Raid 2 much less unique a film than its predecessor, it still registers as a pretty vibrant entry into the Yakuza genre.
The Raid 2 picks up immediately after the events of The Raid: Redemption. Bruised and bloodied, Rama (Iko Uwais), our rookie cop protagonist, has dragged himself and two of the three survivors from the events of the first film to the one man Rama’s brother has assured him he can trust: Bunawar (Cok Simbara). The head of an anti-corruption task force, Bunawar makes Rama an offer he certainly can refuse (for a while)—go deep undercover, cozy up to some high-level gangsters and discover exactly which cops are on their payrolls. Of course, eventually, events will persuade Rama to help Bunawar.
From there, things get a bit more complicated. (The very fact I wrote the preceding sentence is evidence of how the sequel differs from the first film.) Soon, Rama finds himself about three right hands down from Bangun (Tio Pakusadewo), the mob boss who rules Jakarta along with rival boss, Goto (Kenichi Endo). Alas, Bejo (Alex Abbad), an up-and-coming gangster who looks unnervingly like Jason Schwartzman, is seeking to destroy the decade-long peace between the two established crime lords.