The Raid 2 (2014)

There is a certain relief in encountering a film with no interest in improving us. The Raid 2 runs two and a half hours and spends nearly all of it breaking bones across Jakarta's criminal underworld. Gareth Evans stages pencak silat with the patience of a watchmaker, then films it like a demolition crew. Rama goes undercover, infiltrates the Bangun syndicate, and the plot duly thickens, though the plot is mostly scaffolding holding up the next fight. Nobody pauses to explain what we should think. Nobody delivers a speech. The machetes do the talking, and they talk for a long time.

Julie Estelle arrives as the Hammer Girl, a combatant of real menace who swings two claw hammers with a technique that suggests genuine homework. Her presence registers as an interesting piece of casting. It does not register as an argument about gender. She is a killer in a film crowded with killers, and the film grants her no thesis. The ensemble is Indonesian and Japanese throughout, which reflects where the film was made and who made it. The result is a gallery of faces the American multiplex rarely bothers with, offered without a single line of self-congratulation. This is diversity as byproduct, not as platform.

For the student of cultural signalling, the pickings are slim, and that is the finding. There is no sermon, no villainous corporation standing in for capital, no climate anxiety, no history in need of correction. The corruption on display belongs to police and gangsters, which is genre furniture and not an indictment of markets. The film wants only to exhaust us, and it succeeds. We file it accordingly: a lean, brutal entertainment that minds its own business. The ledger stays clean. Almost nothing to report. Refreshing, in its way.