The greatest sin that The Raid 2: Berandal commits is having the audacity to try and follow in the wake of perfection. 2011’s The Raid: Redemption is -and I say this with hyperbole in check- the purist action movie of the last decade. It was 100-minutes of dudes punching, pummeling, shooting and stabbing the hell out of each other, all taking place in near real-time in the dangerous slumhouse in Indonesia. Writer-director Gareth Evans crafted a martial arts film of singular purpose, and delivered on it so completely and efficiently, that there didn’t seem like any place left to go from there.

Unsurprisingly, reading up on the sequel reveals that The Raid 2 was originally an entirely different film that Evans was planning on making, but due to budget restrictions, he instead made a cheaper film in The Raid, making it perhaps the best proof-of-concept/”let me show you I know what I’m doing” movie ever. Rather than feeling like Evans is cutting corners by molding his original vision of an Indonesian crime epic in order to capitalize on the popularity of The Raid, The Raid 2 is everything an impossible sequel should be, in that it maintains the spirit of its predecessor, while also trying to be its own beast.

Picking up just hours after the first, survivor and MVP ass-kicker of the first film, officer Rama, is spurred into becoming part of a dangerous undercover operation meant to route out corruption in the police force. Free physically and temporally from the confines of the first film’s drug house, Evans builds a far more expansive narrative and world for his follow-up. Setting up multiple different crime families and factions vying for control of the city, with Rama caught in the middle, Berendal sees Evans working out emotional and dramatic muscles that were fueled purely by adrenaline in the first film. There are whole stretches of the film where people aren’t beating the tar out of one another, but it works because The Raid 2 adopts the pacing and style of a suspenseful police thriller.

Often times the film feels like it has more in common with The Departed and The Godfather (as embodied by Eka, a Tom Hagen like adoptee of one of the crime families) than it does Redemption. With so many characters and a translation to be filtered through, it’s hard to tell if some of the finer details of the plot would hold up under scrutiny, and Evans sets up more interesting characters than he has time to explore deeply (more adventures with Bat Boy and Hammer Girl, please!). 

When it comes down to the action, though, The Raid 2 delivers. Like the story, it’s more ambitious and open-ended, with the fight choreography allowing for greater variation and bigger brawls. That purity of the first film is impossible to top though; the action may be more complex in The Raid 2, but the emotional and dramatic simplicity of The Raid made each hit matter more than the double-dose Berendal delivers to try and one-up its predecessor. Evans’ explosive filmmaking style works best when the pressure is more contained; he knew every contour and pressure point of that dilapidated row house from the first film, and the greater scope of The Raid 2 can’t match that kind of intimacy. Still, it’s a thrilling, exceptionally well-directed action movie, and a worthy successor to The Raid simply for being its own thing.