Chris At The Pictures

The Best 10 Films of 2014 (Ascending order)

10. Noah – Conquered all my issues with the original Biblical story with incredible spectacle, visual grace and powerhouse performances.

9. Pride – Wonderful historical drama with more than enough laughs and a cast so enjoyable you’ll want to hug them all…twice.

8. Gone Girl – Delicately crafted and gorgeously mounted ‘who-dunnit’ which brings David Fincher back to his A-game.

7. Lone Survivor – Brutal, nihilistic and avoids flag-waving throughout. Career performances from all involved and a well-handled tribute to those who lost their lives is the blood-soaked icing on the cake.

6. The LEGO Movie – Funny, flashy and sumptuously creative. Other toy-based franchises could learn an awful lot from this…I’m looking at you, Transformers.

5. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes – State-of-the-art special effects genre picture meets political and philosophical drama. The director risks placing the simians over the human characters and the film is all the better for it.

4. X-Men: Days of Future Past – Simultaneously paves a new path for the franchise and effectively erases the worst parts of it. Bryan Singer’s return is more than a cause to celebrate.

3. The Raid 2 – Flawlessly executed martial arts picture that fuses the thematic structure of The Departed with the one-man army of The Dark Knight (minus rubber suit).

2. The Guest – Helmed by people who know exactly what they’re doing and how to get the best reaction from an audience. It’s gorgeous, gory and an absolute ball from start to finish.

1. Interstellar – As much as I hate to sound like a stuck record, there’s really no competition here: Nolan has crafted a monumental sci-fi drama that brings the works of Lucas, Spielberg and Kubrick into a glorious melange of brains and heart.

The Worst 10 Films of 2014 (Descending order)

10. Divergent – Another dystopian teen franchise that feels dead on arrival. Key features are bland leads and a void-like abyss of humour and wit.

9. If I Stay – Chloe Grace Moretz bats her eyelashes and swishes her hair at the camera for 90 minutes while everyone around her sobs rather annoyingly.

8. A Million Ways to Die in the West – Witless, done-to-death comedy tropes fall flat while Charlize Theron and co. look on in horror. Go back to TV, Seth.

7. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Heroes in a half-assed shell of a movie: ugly to look at, irritating to listen to, it’s a chore from start to finish.

6. Annabelle – A prequel no-one wanted that has a total lack of visual flair, good scares and interesting characters, making it either painful to sit through or bliss to sleep through.

5. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones – Painfully slow, not scary in the slightest, and all over the place. Paramount, please stop funding these; you’re only making it worse.

4. Devil’s Due – Vomit-inducing garbage to which the label ‘horror’ only applies once you’ve seen the box-office takings.

3. Transformers: Age of Extinction – Michael Bay continues in his quest to burn the nostalgia of the 80’s to the ground and modern action cinema along with it.

2. Tarzan – Childhood-destroying rubbish that looks like the Postman Pat movie trying to mate with the corpse of Avatar.

1. The Other Woman – A handbag full of sick.

The Raid 2 is writer/director Gareth Evans’ sequel to the 2012 breakout hit The Raid. After barely surviving the assault on the tenement block, Rama (Iko Uwais) is recruited by his superiors for a deep-cover mission inside a prison in order to befriend a powerful warlord’s son (Arifin Putra). After two years inside, and having emerged unscathed from riots and attempts on his life by other prisoners, Rama is drawn into an escalating conflict between rival gangs, delving into the depths of porn dens, drug trafficking and, as you’d expect, a series of increasingly violent incursions.

One of the few criticisms levelled at The Raid was that it’s narrative structure was too simple, and The Raid 2’s 150-minute running time ensures that a simple cops vs thugs romp evolves into an intricate crime drama, which begins to feel more like The Dark Knight than just a martial arts movie. Nolan’s Batman sequel film has already been cited aplenty in preliminary reviews of the movie, but the notable difference here is that The Dark Knight devoted too much of its running time to an un-necessary love triangle and one too many scenes of ‘moral panic’, Evans manages to find room for the smaller and more intimate scenes in amongst the action sequences and allows the drama more time to fully unravel without feeling rushed.

As for the fight sequences, undoubtedly the main selling point of the film, they are orchestrated masterfully. While the first movie made me feel like people were genuinely being badly hurt, The Raid 2 made me wonder how no-one was actually killed during filming, as the combination of physicality, incredibly solid sound design and the sheer amount of blood on screen leads to an raw, intense and often wince-inducing experience that is gleefully gory and breathtakingly choreographed. The martial arts are beautifully orchestrated, each fight building on the last and managing to raise the stakes still higher, introducing fresh environments, weapons, and fighting styles.

The cast all perform extremely well, Iko Uwais particularly lending an electrifyingly intense screen presence that shifts seamlessly between sullen, desperate, and incredibly determined. Arifin Putra is more than capable as the up-and-coming young crime lord, his feverish determination bridging the gap between power-hungry and power-mad, and his various rivals and cohorts perform admirably, Julie Estelle providing one of the most memorable screen adversaries despite how little screen time is devoted to her. 

Joseph Trapanese makes a welcome return as lead composer, the pulsing electronic score returning to the fray, remaining unobtrusive but giving the fights an underlying level of menace burning away beneath the crunches and thuds of the martial arts. The joint cinematography between Dimas Sabhono and Matt Flannery is also back, always keeping pace with the whirlwind of action and never feeling like it's simply running to catch up, and providing some starkly bleak establishing shots of the city and surrounding countryside. 

The Raid 2 is an astonishing collection of action, martial arts and intricate character drama that are flawlessly executed, and provides a level of intensity rarely seen on screen. If – like me – you’ve felt that action movies of late have lost their physicality and a sense of genuine threat in favour of headache-inducing CGI and giant robots, then  set aside a couple of hours and see Gareth Evans’ martial arts masterpiece. Trust me; you’ll emerge from the cinema feeling like you’ve been beaten savagely over the head...but in the best possible way.

5 Stars