The Raid: Redemption & The Raid 2: Berendal

You could argue, as many have, that The Raid 2 is an inferior sequel to the original Raid, and I probably wouldn't argue with you too harshly. After all, I've long held that part of the beauty of the original Raid is its tightness - it hits the ground running, spends barely ten minutes setting up its action, and then barely takes a breath for the rest of its runtime. Meanwhile, The Raid 2 is over an hour longer than the original, and much of that extra time is spent on a story that, while not uninteresting, ultimately doesn't give you much you haven't seen before. An undercover cop who's losing his boundaries, an ambitious son who desires the respect his father won't give him...they're familiar elements, to be sure, and The Raid 2 doesn't really bring much new to the table. And yet, I don't think it makes any major missteps with them either, which means that, at worst, they're a little dull sometimes, but still manage to bring some depth and pathos to a series that was criticized for its shallowness in the first entry. The other thing The Raid 2 brings, of course, is action, as director Gareth Evans and his cast/crew look at everything done in the first film and try to outdo it, from car chases to hammer-wielding henchmen to brutal brawls in deserted kitchens. And when that action is going, The Raid 2 is everything you want it to be and more, delivering sequences that put just about everything else out there to shame, and do right by the high standard set by the first movie. Yes, The Raid 2 is a little long; yes, it's weirdly edited (particularly with regard to the "Sad Dog" storyline, which feels truncated and ineffective, as though we're missing a lot of its relevance); yes, you could tighten it and make it a superior film. And yes, watching it back to back with the original (which we cued up immediately after the second) makes it clear that the first film is the superior entry. But for all of that, The Raid 2 is still a spectacular action movie, beautifully filmed, incredibly choreographed, and ambitious to address some of the comments made about its predecessor. And if it doesn't live up to the original, well, that's okay - not much does. But any film that delivers anything close to the last 30-45 minutes of this movie can't be all bad, to say nothing of all the other moments throughout.

- Josh Mauthe