Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
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.