The Raid 2 - Proper Action

What with the Easter break upon us last weekend, last Thursday evening wasn't a school night!  So with several things ahead of me over the weekend I decided it was an excellent opportunity to get myself down to the Reading Vue to see The Raid 2.

The Raid 2 eh?  The announcement of the sequel to the hugely entertaining and brutally violent The Raid didn't exactly fill me with excitement.  Nothing specifically against this film, more something against the idea of a sequel at all.  The Raid was so refreshing; in a world of films like The Expendables with its endless ammunition and rubbish dialogue, it was eye-opening to see a film that harked back to what makes action films great.  Would The Raid 2 be able to recapture that excitement?  Or would it just end up going over the same old territory?

The first thing to say about The Raid 2 is that it has almost nothing at all to do with The Raid.  The plot is that the main guy who survived through to the end of the insanity of the raid on the apartment block in The Raid (Rama) is now drafted into the police's anti-corruption unit.  He is to get himself ingratiated into the local crime syndicate in order to find out information about how they are connected to some of the biggest criminals in the city.  To do this, he needs to leave his wife and child behind, and get himself sent to prison so he can become the best buddy of crimelord Bangum's son Uco.  Cue 2 and a half hours of brutal fight scenes.

Brutal.  That's a very appropriate word for the fight scenes that are what The Raid 2 is all about.  The film has a number of memorable set pieces.  The first is a fight scene in a prison yard in torrential rain during which the ground turns to mud and prisoner after prisoner gets horribly maimed.  A second is an astonishing car chase involving several cars, a motorbike and a fistfight inside one of the cars.  A final one involves Rama's final assault on the offices of Uco's new associate Bejo; a sequence of fights ensues that involves Rama fighting a baseball-wielding guy, a blind girl with hammers and an amazingly choreographed stand-off between him and Bejo's number one bodyguard (pictured).  It's a fight scene that starts off with a sparkle in its eye, as the characters try to work each other out and seem to relish having a worthy opponent; but then becomes a brutal battle to the death as each realise that one of them wont be walking away alive.

Currently The Raid 2 is rocking an unbelievable 8.9 rating on IMDB.  Despite this score putting the film ahead of a number of classic movies, it's hard for me to disagree.  The film does precisely what it says on the tin; it's an amazing action film with amazing fight sequences that gets to the heart of what makes action films great.  You might criticise it for coming across like a computer game with levels, but that would be incredibly picky.  You might also criticise its terrible female characters, but that's typical for this genre.  It's easily as good as The Raid, better perhaps.  Anyone who has ever enjoyed an action film should watch this.  Hollywood needs to pay attention and take notes if anyone tries to makes another Expendables movie.  Do it like this!

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - or this film

I need to stop automatically watching everything that Mark Kermode gives luke-warm recommendations to.  I think this film came up in one of the 5-Live podcasts from a year or so ago and so it went on to my Lovefilm list right away.  It came in the post over the weekend and when I got back late Sunday night with no-one else around I decided to watch it right away.  Sadly, it left me completely cold.  So cold in fact that this review will contain spoilers, as I need to get a couple of things off my chest.

I have several detailed problems with Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, the basic premise of which is so clichéd I hardly want to describe it.  But here we go anyway.  There's a big house and something bad happened in the house in the past.  In the modern day, a nice couple (Alex and Kim, played by Guy Pierce and Katie Holmes) move into the house.  Cue some horror hi-jinx.  Whatever - we've all seen this before, but that in itself doesn't have to be a bad thing.  Let's get stuck into why this is even rubbisher than it sounds:

Firstly, is this meant to be a film for kids?  Because if it isn't then it's not scary at all, and if it is then it's got enough brutal violence in it to more than justify its 15 rating, therefore excluding its entire audience.  The reason I suspect it's for kids is that for a supposed horror film there are very few deaths, and that the opening sequence feels like something out of Round the Twist.  The 'big bad' is actually a bunch of rather silly-looking ratmen who come up from the floorboards and hide under your bed whispering noises into your ear.  They have the feel of the child snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - hardly Evil Dead is it?  But then it can't be for kids, because in the opening scene a man pins a woman to the ground and uses a chisel to smash her teeth out - killing her.  Seriously.  As such, Don't Be Afraid of the Dark falls between two genres and will end up satisfying no-one.  The tone is all over the place.  Simply put, it's not scary enough for horror fans but too gruesome for children.

The second point is the dismal foreshadowing of what happens to Kim and its Victorian overtones regarding attitudes to women.  It's a classic setup, a mid-30s man's daughter (Sally) is moving in with him and his new girlfriend Kim, but Sally is struggling to accept this new woman in her father's life.  In her innocent child-like way she describes her new surrogate mother as 'old', thus foreshadowing what must happen to all women in the eye of the silver screen as they age - which is to fade away and vanish.  When it is stated that the ratmen have to 'take one life' before they return to the underworld the rest of the film is immediately plotted out and the DVD can be turned off safe in the knowledge that Kim must be sacrificed in favour of Sally's youth.  I.e. mothers must willingly sacrifice themselves for their children.  Older women are past it at the age of 35 and should give up their place in the world for younger women, who still have a chance to conceive.  There's even a visual metaphor for the umbilical cord that separates Kim from Sally in the final scene, the mother must die so that the child can live.  Please tell me if you think I'm reading too much into this, but the visual language of cinema tells stories just as much as the dialogue does, and I think it's extremely distasteful.

Finally, there are the PLOT HOLES.  These mainly revolve around the way that the police don't seem capable of doing any sort of investigation, even when a man is horrible disfigured in a terrifying knife attack.  Also there's the ineptitude of the ratmen.  If all they need to do is kill Sally, eat her teeth and bugger off back into the netherworld then they have ample opportunities to get on with it.  Instead they mince around in her room calling her name and appearing under her bedsheets along with discordant music in a dreary attempt at cattle-prod horror.  The Nazis were frightening, this lot are too inept to be anything more than a mild annoyance.

Lastly - Katie Holmes isn't old.  According to imdb she's a week younger than me, so leave her alone!

Save yourself 90 minutes - don't watch this.