I’m done.

The Raid 2: Berandal - 4/5

At somewhere around the two-hour mark, the movie introduces three new villains. Street Fighter super-villains. And it is fucking exciting, because that one dude has already fought all them other fuckers and now that one dude has to fight all them new fuckers even though he is tired and it is time you need be going to bed. I don’t mean to become a movie-poster movie critic (because I am simply a humble one-visit blogger.com movie critic), but I would like to use the word “relentless” to describe this movie. Well, let me take a step back. The first movie was relentless. Too much so, I think, because it didn’t have time to develop any sort of feelings about the people he was fighting. A lot of faceless… faces. Faceless feet? This movie shorthands that with the video game baddies and their ‘one thing they do well’ (hammers, baseball bat, round-y knife things), and it’s such a wonderful shortcut. They don’t have names, but You Know Them. Shortcuts and long stretches of tension between each fight serve to slow the movie down, which is important to what makes the movie work. It’s fight fight fight but with those long stretches of plot-stuff in between. Time to decompress, and to think about your life. Breathe, baby, breathe. So yes, relentless, but with little rest area stops. Barreling down the freeway with your Mountain Dew Livewire, but with scheduled pee-breaks. Unlike ‘The Winter Soldier,’ the fights don’t move the plot along – here, everything serves to let you observe the fight in its most pure form. They are not the ‘nice-to-haves’; they are the ‘reason for existing.’