The opening shot of The Raid 2: Berandal seems to last forever. A car travels down a long country road, men in suits emerge, a body is bundled out. If the basic rules of the sequel apply, then we know we’re going to see even more violence in this follow-up to the body-strewn adrenalizer The Raid: Redemption, but who would have bargained on a slow burn like this?

“I wanted to confound those expectations and confound them headfirst,” says writer-director Gareth Evans, calling the Straight from his home in Jakarta. “Some fans wanted it to be The Raid with a slightly bigger building. That first shot was designed to tell the audience, ‘Okay, settle down, let’s not expect this to be the same as the first film.’ ”

In the 2011 movie, a SWAT team enters a high-rise slum filled with kill-happy gangsters and gets its ass kicked nonstop for the next 90 minutes. It was an exercise in pure vertical corpse-piling that established Evans and his Indonesian star Iko Uwais as the most exciting thing to happen to action cinema since John Woo and Chow Yun-Fat beat us into submission back in the ’90s.

With Berandal, which opens Friday (April 11), Evans obviously wants to inform us that his skill set extends beyond choreographing a string of fight scenes. This is a gangster story on an epic scale, complete with simmering Freudian subplots and a pervasive sense of despair that lingers long after its 150 minutes have unspooled. The action scenes are still phenomenal, with Uwais’s silat-practising character, Rama, surviving the first movie to go undercover in the second, but they’re framed by contemplatively shot scenes of tense dialogue and stylish nihilism.

“We wanted to combine that dynamic handheld feel for the action sequences and offset it with this more classical composition, these more beautifully framed shots establishing rooms and location and character that would feel like one of those old American crime movies or a Japanese yakuza movie,” explains the filmmaker, who also notes the influence of that archstylist Nicolas Winding Refn. “I wanted it to be this brutally violent but beautiful-looking film at the same time.”

If you’re looking for a classic model, think of the way The Road Warrior expanded on Mad Max. One wonders if the Welsh émigré could have done any of this if he’d taken those one or two offers Hollywood threw at him, instead of remaining as “one of the managers of the company” in his Southeast Asian outpost. But if there’s justice, The Raid 2 will only improve his leverage, not least of all because—sprawling gangland opera aside—nobody’s lost sight of what made that first film so astounding.

“Modern action films just tend to constantly hit you with a barrage of different images and sound effects which are there purely to make the audience feel like they’re watching choreography when all they’re really watching is a close-up of a guy shake his head and arms around,” tuts Evans. “That’s one of my pet hates. I can’t stand seeing shortcuts taken on something that I feel so passionate about—which is action.”

Georgia Straight, April 2014