|
Teenage Fansub posted:Just saw it. Counterpoint: There was a deaf hammer assassin girl in this movie. Also Mad Dog was in it, but it totally wasn't Mad Dog.
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2014 07:30
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 16, 2024 11:21 |
|
|
Payndz posted:I had much the same feelings to the first film as Xeno; while the cops were gunfighting it was very exciting and intense, then once it turned into a series of martial arts brawls where characters were having their heads repeatedly kicked and smashed against concrete without a care, it got a bit boring. I don't think martial arts movies are for you. This resilience is kind of a hallmark of martial arts in general (especially after Jackie Chan made his mark) and South East Asian movies in particular (Ong Bak makes the Raid look like everyone's made of paper mache) It is a nice reversal that while the problem of Thai action cinema (the other emergent national cinema in martial arts) was that each one was progressively sillier with less and less plot (until we got to "The Protector 2, which was just depressing) Raid 2 seems to have too much of it. It felt almost Kitano esque how it kept getting distracted with increasingly detailed sub plots. "Look, I know you want to get back to Rama's investigation, but I've got a really sad hitman story to show you." Also, yeah, the fight scenes were crazy. I counted at least 12 separate major action scenes. Impressively, they're all distinct in my head. With each one I was thinking "Wow, that was the best one, obviously, they won't top that." Then ten minutes later they would. I've realised I have no idea which is my favourite. quote:Rama is supposed to be clean but there's no way he's affording a place like that in Jakarta unless he's on the take. Indonesia, like a lot of countries in the world, has a massive gap between the middle and working class. You can actually see the physical difference between the tall, pale middle class and the small, dark, wirey working class (think the difference between Andy and Mad Dog in the first movie) And so while there's slums and shanty towns, there's also plenty of really nice houses and apartments. That was an interesting component of the first movie: the class difference between Rama and the occupants of the block (which makes the scene where the man hides him more important) Snowman_McK fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Mar 30, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2014 23:47
|
|
|
Alan Smithee posted:I was wondering about the car assault where one or more of the attackers turns out out to be cops. He asks what that was about and the guy said it was some territorial thing. I know corrupt cops aren't exactly news but was there some conclusion supposed to be drawn? It's the same thing it always means in an action movie or gangster movie: the hero can't trust anyone. There was also the character point that he realised how much he's changed. If you watch the scene again, watch how brutally he dispatches everyone, not just the guy who's face he burns off. Later on, in the loading dock, he beats everyone up, but doesn't kill anyone. The idea being he's reclaiming his identity as someone who does good, who isn't a killer by nature.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2014 00:10
|
|
|
Alan Smithee posted:Honestly I didn't get that at all from the last part especially True. He also essentially guts two knife guy. Hence the finality of "I'm done" you can't have halfway measures. You can try to reclaim your honour/soul/role as a lawful man, and do it clean, but it always ends up messy. That's why two of his last kills in the movie fall against him as if in embrace, because that's his kin now, that's who he's bonded to.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2014 00:48
|
|
|
Jonny Angel posted:Ooh, I know this one. I agree with every word of this. Just substitute "brutality" for "criminality" and you've got exactly what I was trying to say. I just saw the crisis of identity being that between a clean and dirty war rather than cop and criminal. In the pornographer's place, he doesn't actually kill anyone directly. He hits the guy who ends up firing the shotgun, he throws another guy into a wall and chases down the boss. He stops short of actually killing him though. Hence that look of regret when he sees the body thrown into the fishpond. Later on he kills several of those attackers without a moment's hesitation.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2014 01:10
|
|
|
Jonny Angel posted:Good point! I think the right way to look at it is that "criminality" is what the characters, themselves, Rama and my boy Eka are consciously concerned with, while the film around them is repeatedly pointing out that cop/criminal was a false dichotomy in the first place. Could it be the last guy executed via exacto-knife? The leader of the prison gang? The only other guy I can think of in the movie who looked like that was the guy baseball bat boy killed alongside the junkie. I'm going to rewatch it this Friday with a different group of friends. Most likely it was a major cast member who ended up having their part largely cut.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2014 03:22
|
|
|
Ogantai posted:Err, I think you're overlooking what I was getting at. Yes, Indonesia has massive class, ethnic, and religious conflict. What I'm pointing out is that the police (at least the clean ones) are not part of that upper class and there's no way an honest one could afford a place like that on his salary, especially with Jakarta real estate prices. (One of my sisters-in-law just put a down-payment on an investment property there (edit: isn't nearly as nice as Rama's) and paid what would probably be many multiples of a cop's annual salary.) It's the dad's place then. It's not that much of a stretch. quote:There's a difference between Jackie Chan's films and The Raid, though. Jackie gets bloodied and bruised, but I could always suspend my disbelief enough to say "Well yeah, he could potentially survive all that. Just about." The Raid was so much more brutal (especially after the gunfight scenes, which established the lethality of the situation) that I couldn't give it the same leeway; the characters should have been concussed/unconscious/dead with pulped skulls way before the end. Could you cite anything in particular that bothered you in either movie? Because the only guys I remember taking heaps of punishment are Rama (who's the hero) Mad Dog (and his brother in the second film, Not-Mad-Dog) and Cecep Arif Rahman's assassin character in the second one. I'd just be surprised if there wasn't a scene where Jackie Chan took worse.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2014 12:28
|
|
|
Alan Smithee posted:Does anyone know the background of the kitchen fight guy? I know Mad Dog was one of the Silat masters right? Was wondering about that guy If you're referring to the guy that played him, he's a Silat master and the guy who introduced Evans and Uwais.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2014 00:08
|
|
|
axleblaze posted:Ah yes, the fight with hammer girl, Baseball Bat Guy and guy he fought after those two were made so much better because of of all the emotion and motivation in those fights, like...um... You get the sense of their bond to each other, of their status as outcasts in a society that doesn't have a lot of room for outcasts. It's just little moments that give the fight a narrative. It's the same sort of little touches that Indiana Jones has, how he gets off the flying wing and puts his hands up with an exhausted resignation. it's as opposed to something like the matrix reloaded (which isn't alone in this, just the worst offender) where the fights are completely divorced from any narrative or character.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2014 02:22
|
|
|
Jonny Angel posted:Ooh, I know this one. Well, the first one at least. Along the same lines, there was an audible "oh" from the audience when her scarred eye was revealed, accompanied by a loss of comfort for the audience. She'd stopped being a faceless killer. It's like that weird moment when you find out Osama Bin Laden loved volleyball and hated too much ice in his drink. Returning to the duality you mentioned above for a moment, Not-Mad-Dog also represents the clean/dirty dynamic. There's the more obvious one, where he's sending money to his family that he's gained by killing people, but it's also represented in his choreography. When he kills the guy with the machete, he handles the bodyguards with his off hand only, keeping his machete out of the fray. He's only there to kill one man. No point killing the rest. The lie of the clean war is still there, though. He's ripping people's hamstrings and crushing their groins, but he can tell himself he's not killing them. It's funny that while the first had so much in common narratively with Dredd, this has so much in common thematically.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2014 23:56
|
|
|
Meowbot posted:Are we really expecting this movie to eventually take the top of the IMDB listings Oh, Icarus, dare not fly too high.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2014 06:09
|
|
|
bullet3 posted:Also, I didn't like this as much as I hoped. quote:The undercover cop storyline ends up being a complete waste of time that goes nowhere, so why waste our time for an hour if that's what you're going to do with it?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2014 01:49
|
|
|
Alan Smithee posted:This is kinda what bugged me the most. It didn't really have any bearing on the climax because he tries to kill him anyway. The "revelation" did nothing to save him or act as a catalyst since it was already moving in that direction anyway It's still someone who killed everyone else in a building to get to him. Whatever side he's on, he's compromised. With regards to Rama's vicious fighting style, there's a tie back to the first film. In the first, every time Rama fights, his facade cracks at the end. His hands drop, his rigid fighting stance vanishes, and he's back to being a scared, fragile human. What someone above said about control, and how fragile it is, is a motif of the fights as well. The prison fight was supposed to be a quick assassination. The attackers clearly had a couple of minutes before the guards would break it up, they may have even made a deal with the guards, but it quickly spirals into a full scale riot. In the restaurant, this isn't the first time goons have come after Prakoso. By the same token, they've got an army and probably figure it's just a quick take down of one guy. Rama seems to be contained in the back of the car, but that's given lie. Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Boy specifically use the phrase business as usual right before their fight with Rama, and the final boss confidently squares up with Rama. Some of it just standard tropes of action films (of course the baddies are arrogant dicks, they're baddies) but it's a consistent motif that we're shown "the plan" only for the plan to fall apart. Someone else described Bejo as a Faustian character, and as soon as you think of him like that, the sacrifice scene makes sense. These are men who entered into some devil's bargain with Bejo, only to find out what it meant far too late ("you will help me conquer the city/") Hence the look of almost resigned anger on the last man's face. Overall though, it's great to see a martial arts movie go for so much more. My girlfriend, who saw the Raid 2 with me, hadn't seen any Tony Jaa movies, so we started watching some. I can't really remember a quicker drop off in quality between a star's two projects. Ong Bak is a simple, effective story. Tom Yung Goong is an incomprehensible mess that seems to have been made by someone who's heard of the concept of narrative storytelling, but didn't care for it.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2014 01:38
|
|
|
Electromax posted:The fight scenes felt like they would never end (especially the 2-on-1 at the end, christ can this be over yet?) This is one of those opinions where you know it exists, but you can't believe a real person holds it.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2014 06:19
|
|
|
FishBulb posted:I should probably watch Merantau. It was on my Netflix queue for a long time back when they had those. It's solid. It follows the same blueprint as things like Ong Bak. I thoroughly enjoyed it at the time, but in retrospect, it looks really unambitious. Its a pretty drat impressive debut though. It's amazing to see how quickly the team has gotten better at what they do.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2014 23:30
|
|
|
Something I spotted on a rewatch, when he chases down the pornographer and hurls him into a TV it's shot in exactly the same way as the thoughtless destruction of the apartment by the machete thugs in the first film.   It's only momentary, but it's another visual reminder of where Rama is on the moral spectrum now. Also, holy poo poo that last fight is bananas.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 23, 2014 02:57
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 16, 2024 11:21 |
|
|
Obstacle posted:On a similarly interesting note, he goes two-on-one against siblings toward the end - much like Mad Dog in the first. The music and choreography of that scene also closely echo the Mad-Dog fight. Rama uses a lot of moves Mad Dog does, especially his throws. It's also structured oddly. The typical pattern would be the hero getting his rear end kicked until he or she manages to make a comeback. The first few good shots are all landed by Rama. The siblings stage a comeback, but it isn't enough. When Hammer Girl dies after a moment of vulnerability (via losing her glasses) Baseball Bat Man's cry is genuine anguish, rather than pure rage. A lot of martial arts movie tropes are very deliberately inverted in that scene. It isn't a mindless action movie. The action itself tells a lot of the story.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2014 01:24
|
|