For Fans of The Raid

Before The Raid, Hollywood action had settled into a grammar of quick cuts and shaky cameras that disguised what bodies were actually doing. Evans and Uwais refused that grammar. Every strike in The Raid is visible, every lock and break legible. Pencak silat, the Indonesian martial art at the film's core, is angular and economical: it assumes multiple attackers, prioritises efficiency over spectacle. The result is action choreography that is also, quietly, a kind of argument about human movement. Films like Sifu (the game) and Warrior (the series) would not look the way they do without it.

The apartment block in The Raid is not a backdrop. Each floor is a distinct environment with its own tactical logic: the open stairwells, the narrow corridors, the locked rooms. Evans uses the architecture to structure the film's rhythm, alternating between the vertical (the climb) and the horizontal (the ambush). It is a design principle that game designers have borrowed deliberately. Hotline Miami's floor-plan layouts and Sifu's ascending building both carry the same grammar: the building is the antagonist as much as any individual inside it.

The Raid 2 is a rare sequel that does not simply repeat its predecessor at larger scale. It expands into a sprawling crime epic across years and factions, closer in spirit to Infernal Affairs or The Godfather than to the original film. Where the first Raid is a pressure cooker, the sequel is a slow burn that earns its extraordinary set pieces, including a mud-covered prison yard brawl and a kitchen fight that belongs among the finest action sequences ever put to film. They are companion pieces, not a diluted franchise.