Zombie Column: Superb Sequels – A Doubleheader

This week, I took in two movies in a doubleheader. And it’s fitting I went to two, because both are sequels (if you hadn’t guessed from the title or anything). I went downtown, because that was convenient for seeing it after work, and not many theatres were playing the second movie I went to. In order, they were Captain America:The Winter Soldier, and The Raid II.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

This is the sequel to Captain America: The First Avenger. Apparently it’s impossible to name these things without a colon somewhere in there. Iron Man got off lucky with numbered sequels and Thor at least managed one before he had subtitles amended to his movies, but the Captain gets colons wherever he goes.

Anyway, the movie starts with the Captain storming a SHIELD freighter that’s been taken over by pirates. These are not Captain Phillips pirates, these are Marvel pirates, so they’re all white (no racial implications for you) and led by a guy played by George St Pierre (the MMA fighter). He and Cap throw down and Cap wins, because St Pierre is not playing a super soldier. After rescuing the hostages, Cap finds Natasha Romanov downloading files from the freighter computer on Nick Fury’s orders, and he’s a little pissed about that, since the mission was supposed to be about saving people, not information.

Back at the base, he and Fury get into it about trust and compartmentalization and all that, and there’s a lot of talking for an action movie. However, it does raise one of the central plots of the movie, which is the balance between freedom and security, in which freedom is always portrayed as right, because this is America, and it’s not like we have metal detectors at the airports or speed limits on roads. Oh wait, we totally do. Still, debate! Depth! Discussion!

We also get The Winter Soldier. Who is he? What is he? Sadly, I had this spoiled by the IMDB page, and also the Cineplex magazine in the theatre, which actually says who he is. Dude, spoilers. Also in the spoiler vein, we get a new technology that neatly steals the plot of Transcendence and packs it into about 10 minutes. I think most people would just accept this new technology and move on, but I’m not sure how many people really understood the mindblowing implications of it. Also, I’m not sure if the film makers understood how limited 70’s era storage technology was. Still, those 10 minutes explain who the bad guys were (these guys again?) and how they came to be.

The Raid II

In case you didn’t know, The Raid was an Indonesian film about a team of police invading a 15-floor apartment building in the slums of Jakarta to take down the mobster that owned the place. So, cops versus criminals in a building. Cool? Cool.

The Raid II takes place afterwards, and has a lot of time skipping back and forth at the beginning. Sorting it all out: right after the first film, Rama (the hero of the first film) meets with an Internal Affairs agent who wants him to go undercover. The first film villain was only a small fish, but the big fish are paying off cops, and the IA officer wants proof. Rama declines, because he has a pregnant wife. However, a few months later his brother is killed by one of the gangs (mobsters, really), so he goes to the IA officer and accepts. He gets himself arrested because the son of one of the mobsters is in jail. They become friends, and two years later (once Rama is released), he goes to work for them as the son’s shadow.

However, there is a new guy in town who wants a piece of the pie. Previously, the pie had only had two pieces – one for a local gang (the one Rama now works for), and one for a Japanese one. The new guy wants to induce a war between the two, edge out the Japanese, and split his remains with the local gang. All of this takes a lot of talking, which is why The Raid II is 2.5 hours long.

Also, it’s long because the director (Gareth Evans) really likes to linger on shots he finds cool. He could’ve cut about 15 minutes if he’d hired a ruthless editor, but no, we get to cut back and forth for a minute between a fair that doesn’t have anything to do with anything, and a field of very tall grass, which is eventually sprayed with blood before we pan over to which body previously held said blood. We get that you like that shot, but maybe you shouldn’t use it in an action movie, Mr. Evans.

All told, both movies are theatre movies. Both movies have car chases that aren’t spectacular, but we aren’t going to these movies for the car chases. We’re going for the fighting. Cap is surprisingly good at hand-to-hand, and The Raid II had martial arts in its car chases, because with a whole city as its set, why not find some inventive places to fight? Neither may live up to the incredible expectations placed on them (The Avengers is still my favourite Marvel Movie, and the Raid had a higher density of fighting, if not total amount). Still, both great movies if you want to see action.