The Raid 2 is the sequel of The Raid: Redemption. This is a confusing fact to some people, including professional movie website Yahoo Movies, which has the first movie listed on their box office chart for this week.  Yahoo went so far as to link to clips and promotions from the first movie as well. They flat out don’t know what movie is in the theater right now.

Here’s some proof:

I’m pretty sure I’m about to ban Yahoo in my household.

So let me set the record straight.

The Raid: Redemption is an amazing blaze of martial arts craziness that had me all jacked up for the sequel.

Long, intricately composed images, that only ever lead to death.

The Raid 2, my friends, is a whole other level of epic. Ditching the confines of the single building location of Redemption, where Indonesian police officer Rama uses his fists, feet, knives, and guns to survive a total criminal onslaught; director Gareth Evans tells a sprawling and complicated story of the barely peaceful coexistence of two gangs that run the city and how our hero, Rama must infiltrate them to root out the corrupt police he exposed in the first movie.

Evans slows the pace way down to tell an honest to goodness story this time. Lingering on long, gorgeously composed shots of color and composition, which shows his immense growth as a cinematographer, we learn of the delicate balance of peace between two rival gangs headed up by respectful men of violence, Goto and Bangun. Our hero Rama inserts himself into prison to befriend Bangun’s son to work his way into the system. And what better way to befriend someone than protect him from absolute death in one of the many outstanding fight sequences in the film: a crazy prison fight in the wet mud with about 100 different people beating each other into pieces. The camera deftly moves among the most interesting mini-stories within the fight so that you easily follow what is going on and it never looks like nameless randoms flailing ineffectively. There is some serious maiming action going on. Be prepared because this is just the start, and when it goes into action mode, it goes full throttle with broken bones and ripped out throats on full display.

Evans uses these changes of pace to great effect. Sometimes too great. In telling the intricate story of Bangun’s son, Uco, and how he feels impotent not running the show, and how Uco is willing to sell his soul to random psychopath Bejo, just to get some more power… sometimes the pacing drops to a crawl. I was reminded of Japanese inspired movies like Memoirs of a Geisha and how deliberately paced but beautifully shot it all was. Evans may or may not be trying to hit this style; I just felt it could have moved along a wee bit more quickly sometimes.

They mean business.

That being said, the story is complicated. Quite complicated. And I appreciate how the slow pace allowed me to stay caught up and actually understand everything that was going on. Because – as we watch Rama and Uco have their lives slowly deconstruct, it leads a building of tension that when released in the final stanza, the feeling of satisfaction is beyond normal words. So I made my own:

I think that sums it up.

One guess if she’s up to any good.

There’s a car chase scene that takes seemingly normal tropes and turns them on their head by making simple and brutal choices where people die quickly. Thus giving the traditional chase, non-traditional heft. There’s a gorgeously crazy comic book fight scene on a train with a deaf girl who is horribly skilled with hammers. There’s a guy with a baseball bat that does some serious damage in ways bats were not meant to be used. But at the center of it all is Rama, played by Iko Uwais, who choreographed the fight sequences and quite frankly deserves a medal, a statue, and a drink at Jamba Juice named after him just for that. He’s an amazing martial artist that makes the brutal beautiful. Oh, and let’s not leave out Gareth’s camera direction. The camera is practically another character in the film. It rotates side ways and even upside down as people’s bodies flip around. The effect puts you inside the chaos in a very real way. You feel the pain being dished out.

Make no mistake. This movie will make you cringe. It will assault your senses. It will gross you out. It will make you ooh… ahh… and stand up out of sheer joy. It’s violent but it knows it’s a movie and the grounded nature of the pain, and the slow and delicate set up of why all these people deserve to get their heads broken, more than makes up for any misgivings you might have about being nice to people.

The final fight with the head bodyguard lasts like 10 minutes and is one of the most stunning, brutal, and awe inspiring fights I’ve ever seen and probably ever will see. Unlike most Hollywood action affairs, the longer it goes on the more jangled your nerves become until you practically can’t take any more, leading to the inevitable conclusion that is so satisfying the two plus hours you spent getting there will feel like a massage.
The Raid 2 takes two hours to get to a half hour of pure violence that made my life feel complete and felt absolutely justified. And that’s WITH a huge number of fights just to get to that point. Before the big release, we have the bathroom fight, the mud fight, the contract killing fight, the bar fight. Not to mention the car chase, the subway fight, the baseball guy fight.

As my friend Mike said, “this is the best action movie I’ve ever seen in my life.”

It uses every last bit of the 150 minutes in the running time. But it’s all worth it.