Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
On Quartile, The Raid 2 scores 8/10 across five categories — strongest on Cinematography (Well Above Average), weakest on Plot (Above Average).
Ranked among Quartile’s Top Cinematography.
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.
The Raid 2 is a masterclass in action filmmaking, with Gareth Evans orchestrating some of the most breathtaking and elaborately choreographed fight sequences ever committed to film. The cinematography is genuinely exceptional — long takes, inventive spatial framing, and a visual fluency that makes the action viscerally coherent even at its most frenetic. The ending kitchen duel and car-chase sequence are among the finest action set-pieces in cinema history, earning a top Ending score. The plot, while more ambitious than its predecessor, is a somewhat conventional crime saga that borrows liberally from Asian crime cinema (Infernal Affairs, Oldboy aesthetics), and the expanded runtime occasionally exposes narrative thinness. Acting is solid but functional — characters serve the action architecture rather than driving deep emotional investment. Novelty is above average for the genre but not wholly singular — it perfects and expands the first film's formula within a familiar undercover-crime framework rather than breaking entirely new conceptual ground.