Barely surviving the metropolitan apocalypse unleashed in Dhaka, but seriously injured, Tyler Rake is placed in a remote mountain residence where he can recover and perhaps enjoy rest from his mercenary exploits. Soon, however, a mysterious individual arrives to offer him an assignment that he cannot refuse: it is in fact Tyler’s ex-wife, Mia, who asks for her help to save her sister Ketevan and her children. These are imprisoned together with the brother of a dangerous Georgian criminal, so obsessed with the idea of controlling her wife that he prefers to have her with him in prison with her children rather than at large. To face the enterprise, Tyler will return to make use of the help of Nik and his brother Yaz.
Tyler Rake 2 confirms the high level of shooting virtuosity, stunts and special effects of the previous chapter, going even further, but losing sight of the compactness of the story.
If the first chapter was in fact a claustrophobically nailed down nightmare in the city of Dhaka, here we move more traditionally on three set pieces, in different places in Georgia, moreover Tyler is often alongside his team and is no longer a lonely man who he gets support from time to time. He still has people to protect, but even this is something that is gradually limited after the first spectacular tour de force. If then in the first chapter the protagonist met an old friend, here he sees his ex-wife again and in the end it will be revealed what led to the breakup of their relationship.
But the formula that wins does not change: the psychological study remains deliberately minimal, Tyler is the emblem of an ordeal that is consumed on his body and above all on that of his enemies (and perhaps there would be something to say about how expendable the bad Slavs are exterminated by the Aryan hero), in the name of a purification from sins that it doesn’t matter to confess, because who doesn’t have any? On the other hand, one could even more prosaically say that he is a videogame figure, as the first Master Chief of Halo is poorly defined so as not to hinder his overlap with the player / spectator – and after all many scenes in the film have the same look of certain video game cutscenes.
The sequence shot, which was already well present in the first film, does not in fact look at the virtuosity of the masters of cinema, not even those of the action genre, but at that of the virtual cameras of video games – where the sequence shot can become literally infinite, as long as the entire game (for example in the latest God of War). As in the previous film, the long take is not the final climax and instead arrives earlier, immediately playing the most aesthetically stunning cards. And that it’s impressive is beyond doubt: it begins in the corridors of a prison, moves to a riot in the courtyard, goes through a long car chase and arrives at a train escape complete with helicopters that assault the convoy.
Above all, the part on the train leaves you truly admired and although you can’t help yourself with the editing breaks, even most of the melee scenes are of a good standard. We are not yet at the unreachable heights of Asian cinema and of works such as The Raid 2, evoked precisely by the revolt in prison, but we are not even that far away.