The writer-director Gareth Evans was raised in Wales, moved to Indonesia in his 20s and rustled up a left-field hit with 2011's The Raid, in which a rookie cop knocked seven bells out of the gangsters infesting a nightmarish block of flats. Now along comes the sequel, which only goes to show that nothing succeeds like excess. The Raid 2: Berandal ups the ante to give us riots in the prison and battles in the bar; a girl wielding hammers and a boy brandishing a bat. It puts its characters to the sword, to the shotgun, and to the speeding automobile. If Evans never actually goes so far as to throw in the kitchen sink as well, he does at least find room for an extended sequence in which a man's face is sauteed on a hot-plate. The movie's menu of carnage reads as long as your arm.
Evil-doers beware, for you have no place left to hide. Iko Uwais is back in business as the redoubtable Rama, sent deep cover into the underworld of Jakarta. Rama, it should be noted, is a master of the Indonesian martial art of "pencak silat", a one-man killing machine who can take out entire armies, providing the army obliges by running at him one man at a time. On this occasion he has been ordered to infiltrate a crime cartel, or possibly two. Who can say for certain? By around the midway mark, our hero has been subjected to so many double-crosses that it's a wonder he knows who he's fighting any more. But never mind, and away we go. Rama fights on because he can, because he must, and because Evans persists in lining up his goons and sending them in single file – cranking the action so quickly that even the subtitles fall out of sequence, toiling desperately to keep pace.
Of course it's preposterous and possibly reprehensible to boot; a vast orchestration of sadism and sentiment. Yet Evans delivers the violence with such astonishing gusto that he barely lets us catch our breath. The plot line may be skimpy but the film's artistry lies elsewhere. It's in the mud of the prison yard or the din of the street; in the blur of limbs and the balletic spin of bodies, when the picture shakes off its shackles to achieve a frantic kind of weightlessness, like one of those cartoon critters that runs off a cliff and pistons its legs to stay aloft. At the end of one apocalyptic battle, Rama retraces his steps back down through the basement where a group of punch-drunk survivors are writhing slowly on the ground, pawing gingerly at their bruises. They could be revellers, nursing the sorest of heads on the morning after the night before. Rising exhausted from my seat when the closing credits rolled, I knew exactly how they felt.
