There’s no overt connection between these two movies. The reason for combining them in a single review is both personal and coincidental. I happened to review both movies in full at film festivals, so you can read my evaluations of The Raid 2 and Bad Words already. They both happen to come out on Blu-ray this week, so I can focus on just digging into the Blu-ray features.
First let’s talk about how the films look. Bad Words is a flawless Blu-ray that you might not notice. The whole film was shot in a muted, run down aesthetic so nothing looks too pretty. To present that in the optimal home viewing format, the Blu-ray is perfectly sharp and clear, but never inserts extra brightness or color to make it look better. It is still the gritty dark comedy I saw in Toronto, perhaps even more honed in on the lack of glamour in the comedy.
The Raid 2 is a much more epic film by nature. Even its basic locations are exotic to us because it’s a foreign country. The Indonesian countryside is gorgeous, while the gritty prison, warehouse and backalley locations look stark and grimy in the clear, sharp frame. However, the crime drama moves into some more lavish, colorful interior sets like a nightclub and lavish penthouse office. It’s also a very modern film, so fights on the subway and during a speeding car chase explode across the widescreen frame. The transfer is the perfect combination of bright colors, beautiful landscape, stark sets and sweaty, bloody action.
Related: The Raid 2: Exclusive Red Band Mash-Up
One feature on The Raid 2 is “The Next Chapter: Shooting a Sequel,” which is also available on the DVD. It is a good summary of making the film. You see some good choreography and filmmaking, but the additional features go more in depth. For example, “Ready for a Fight: On Location” illustrates technical aspects of capturing the film’s action. It’s one thing to hear how they shot the prison bathroom fights, but seeing it before your eyes is as wondrous as watching the sequence finished in the film.
“Violent Ballet: Behind the Choreography” is unfortunately not a showcase of choreography. It’s an interview segment talking about choreography. It’s philosophically interesting, but the “Ready to Fight” feature actually shows choreography as it’s happening. We see snippets of the preproduction videos, which are awesome, but what would have been more illustrative would be to see the preproduction choreography on green mats side by side with the finished scene in the film.
A Q&A with Evans, Uwais and composer Joe Trapanese at Cinefamily covers your all encompassing filmmaker interview. It’s good publicity for the local theater. If you’re ever in L.A., check out a Cinefamily show. The interview is mostly stuff I’ve heard before from various interviews with Evans, and hopefully you’ve heard too because you read all our interviews. If for some reason you haven’t, this Q&A is a good archive of production info, and example of the banter between Evans and Uwais. They do talk about the deleted gunfight, which I had not heard about before since I never knew it was in the movie. When they throw it to audience questions after 27 minutes, the DVD producers smartly give us text interstitials of the questions rather than trying to hear an un-mic’ed audience member. It’s 40 minutes of quality Q&A here. Evans is a talker.
Speaking of which, his commentary never lets up for 150 minutes. Even more interesting is an English language audio track to the film. You would hope that a dub job for a film as big as The Raid 2 would at least be reasonable. Well, it’s not as ridiculous as Kung Fu Theater but I guess there’s no way a voiceover actor can give the same attention and preparation to a performance that the actual actor did. One vocalist trying to sound like a grizzled old man only seems like a shallow effort. Plus, there’s no shaking the weirdness of an all American action hero voice coming out of Uwais’s mouth. So yeah, read the subtitles, people.
Related: Exclusive Video Interview with Jason Bateman
A short five minute collection of deleted scenes offers a little bit of extra bad behavior on Bateman’s part, but a good chunk of it is taken up by some unnecessary plot business that was rightfully cut. A 10-minute behind the scenes feature touches on a worthwhile number of aspects of making the film, considering it was made independently and sought distribution at TIFF. Of course, chances were good a Jason Bateman movie would make it onto DVD and Blu-ray so they were smart to plan ahead for bonus features.
If you’re a die-hard fan of Bad Words, you may want a bit more out of a Blu-ray, but I don’t know how much you could add without seeming like filler. They could interview the cast more and give us talking heads features, but we don’t need more of that. We’ve got the commentary, the deleted scenes and some footage from the set.
The Raid 2 Blu-ray has everything you could want: outstanding presentation of the film, detailed commentary from the director, an awesome deleted action scene and some insightful bonus features. One of the extras is a missed opportunity, as one imagines there is a lot more archival material of choreography rehearsals, but if we watched every fight scene in raw form that might get tiring too. I’m recommending both Blu-rays for the movies themselves, and either have an assortment of extras that extend the lives of the films.
The Raid 2:
Bad Words:
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
