100
Hyper-violent it may be but there is beauty in its brutality.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
There are tradeoffs with the switch to a more epic, ambitious canvas, but Gareth Evans’ action sequel in most ways that count is an even more masterful jolt of high-energy genre filmmaking.
60
The Raid 2's faults are not in Evans's technique – he's unusually adept at capturing the art of violence. Instead, the film suffers from too much potential.
83
The Raid 2 brings the noise, but length, repetition and too much space also make it a slightly reduced echo of its predecessor.
63
Slant Magazine by Jesse Cataldo
It's all showy viscera, no ballet, and wan attempts at the gravity of something like Drug War, with implicit statements made about the deadening nature of violence or the moral equivalency of state-sanctioned and criminal force, don't come close to cohering.
80
No other filmmaker on the planet can touch Evans for long-take beatdowns and wildly inventive flourishes.
70
It’s hard to shake a nagging feeling of more is less; with its convoluted plot mechanics clearly cribbed from past thriller templates, the film never quite generates or sustains its predecessor’s pure sense of menace.
50
McClatchy-Tribune News Service by Roger Moore
“The Raid” was a great action film in which the violence, excessive though it was, served as obstacles in the hero’s simple quest. In Raid 2 the violence is the movie, its excess used to cover for an inept story, thinly-drawn characters and dead spots.
84
Good luck finding a modern martial-arts epic that can even hold a candle to it.
The Raid 2 ramps up the insanity of the first film, mostly by just adding more people to kill. Like a video game, The Raid 2 has levels, minibosses, power weapons. It's two and half hours of punching, kicking, shooting, stabbing, sometimes in verges on exhausting just how bloody this film is, but the sheer beauty of the individual fight scenes more than make up for any numbness it might induce. I'm always up for more Raid films - just put Iko Uwais up against increasingly larger hordes of criminals -- and larger criminals, for that matter.