Bigger, Better, Bloodier!

If Gareth Evans is a name with which you are unfamiliar, why do you read this blog? It's about movies. And Gareth Evans is a name which, in the movie, world, is quickly becoming huge. When The Raid hit screens three years ago, it was a low-budget, gritty martial arts action film and its visceral action sequences and close camera work made it a cult hit and raked in fifteen times its one million-dollar budget.

Now, The Raid 2: Berandal is out in cinemas and it's bigger, badder and bloodier than ever before. Featuring a more expansive world, more involving story and an impressive array of detailed characters, it's still the bone-crunching, face-breaking fist-thrower the prequel was; only this time, Evans has the budget to spread it about a bit.

It shows, too; there's about ten times the story in this one, picking up almost immediately where the original left off. Rama is drawn into the dealings of a group of cops trying desperately to weed out corruption in their own force and is sent in undercover to investigate a local gang known to have many of the corrupt officers in their pocket. Throughout everything he kicks and punches his way through the typical assortment of fast-paced fights and deadly enemies, but thanks to a bigger budget - and Evans' own gloriously gritty imagination - the battles are bigger, the sets cooler and the enemies far more dangerous.

It's very easy to compare this one to the original and find better things - I found the original Raid unremarkable, if spectacular, and this one is almost like a breath of fresh air thanks to its weighty storyline and fantastic sets. But this comparison is unreliable. This has a much larger budget, more characters, more story - it's very difficult to get away from how much bigger it is. And I think that's a good thing.

Whereas throughout much of The Raid I found my mind wandering and I wasn't sure exactly what was going on, this one kept me hooked throughout, not just with the awesome fight scenes but with the story and the characters: Yayan Ruhian makes a reappearance as 'Koso, another Mad-Dog-style fighter who has two very impressive fights but is much more fleshed-out than the gang leader's right hand man ever was, as he struggles to decide what is right between trying to control the son of a mafia kingpin and sort out his own family life.

But let's talk about the fight scenes: THEY. ARE. AWESOME.

Okay, so I don't want to spoil anything, but there's a guy who kills people with a baseball and a steel bat, and his sister/partner who smashes people to death with hammers. The fights are gloriously bloody (highlights include TWO scenes of killer car-fu, a night-club fight featuring Yayan Ruhian, and a no-holds-barred beatdown in a restaurant kitchen) and everything is so tense I found myself holding my breath halfway through the battles. After every one you're breathing with the characters, you need to cool off as much as they do.

And yet through it all Gareth Evans still finds time to inject a little comedy into his film. I don't want to spoil it, but it's dark and gory and it's hilarious every time. The Raid 2 is the only movie I know which can simultaneously gross you out and leave you in stitches.

There isn't really anything I can add now, except OH MY GOD WHY HAVEN'T YOU SEEN THIS YET GO SEE IT NOW! Seriously, go see it.

Adieu!