How on earth can people prefer this mess to orginal???
I was shocked when I saw the high score of 8.1 for this movie and I was even more shocked that it scored significantly higher than the excellent first movie!
I've watched The Raid 2 twice just to be sure, but my initial reaction didn't change - this sequel is a mess and it feels like they quickly churned this out in a rush to capitalize on the success of the first film.
Don't get me wrong, this is still a decent film, but I think it's worse than The Raid 1 in just about every way. The pacing is all wrong this time around - there's too many stop-start moments that break up the flow, with many sections just plain boring. The story isn't very good. The "overambitious son wants to take over from his father" feels tired and specific plot points are confusing and it's hard to keep track of some of the characters and their names. This also damages the viewing experience during the action sequences...
At several points there were frantic fight scenes going on - but I had very little idea of what was going on or why they were even fighting. Without a clear, solid plot to back it up it's just a load of random violence for no reason. Within the first few minutes Rama gets attacked by about 15 people in a toilet, but there's no explanation as to why they were attacking him in the first place! A bad guy from the first movie is mysteriously back alive and well - though I'm guessing that he's supposed to be a different character (so yet another poor element to this film that adds confusion). Also, why is Rama in prison for over 2 years when the plan was for 3 months? There's so many plot holes or sections like this that aren't explained clearly that by the end I couldn't give a *beep* what happened to any of the characters.
As I say it's not a bad movie, it's just much much worse than the first and it would have been so much better if the actual "raid" element came much sooner in the movie. After all the film is called The Raid then the actual raid part is rushed through in about 5-8 minutes near the end to make way for all the boring plot earlier on 