I have not seen the first "Raid" film. From what I've read, it has a bare bones plot that functions as an excuse for fight scenes, takes place over the span of less than a day, and has a run time of just over 100 minutes. "The Raid 2" would have been well served by taking a similar approach. Instead, it has an overly complicated plot that spans years and is stuffed to the brim with clichés, and its runtime is two and a half hours, almost half again as long as the original.
Much of this unnecessary screen time goes towards servicing the unoriginal, boring plot. The basic storyline of a cop going undercover to infiltrate the mob has been told countless times before, and this version of the story brings literally nothing new to the table. When a movie's major appeal is its elaborate fight sequences, it is often better to keep the plot minimal and let those sequences do the talking, as it seems the original film did. If you're going to disregard that method, you'd better have an interesting story to tell. The worst thing you can do is what this film does: try to tell a more complicated story, but end up doing it so ineptly that I'm praying for the movie to end before it's half over. I could almost feel the plot awkwardly contorting itself to make up excuses for fight sequences that involved characters only tangentially related to the rest of the story.
The fight sequences aren't bad in their choreography. Some of the fights near the end are actually quite impressive...probably. To be honest, the film had completely lost me long before it got anywhere near its climax. Even if the ending had featured the greatest fight scene in the history of cinema, it would not have earned more than a shrug from me. I was still sitting in my seat, but this plodding, overlong film had seen me mentally check out long ago.
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