The Raid 2: Too much butt kicking?

I probably should be ashamed of myself, but I couldn't totally resist a brutal action film with a brother/sister team of assailants called Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man.

If you know that director Gareth Evans' martial arts-oriented thriller is set in Indonesia and you're familiar with The Raid: Redemption (also directed by Evans), you don't need much by way of information about this bruising second helping of physical mayhem.

In The Raid: Redemption, a Jakarta SWAT team stormed a building occupied by ruthless killers. Here, the action spreads across the whole city.

It's impossible to watch The Raid 2 without feeling as if you've been beaten up yourself. The flying fists and lethal kicks arrive with so much fury that it would be a gross understatement to call the action "over the top."

The main character in this frequently savage concoction is Rama (Iko Uwais), a cop who we met in the first installment. This time, Rama is coerced into taking an undercover assignment as a soldier in the army of a gang lord named Bungun (Tio Pakusodewo).

To accomplish his task, Rama -- sent to prison to establish his gangster cred -- must win the confidence of Bungun's son Uco (Arifin Putra).

An ambitious hothead, Uco thinks it's time for him to replace his father, a crime lord who has fostered an era of peace with his Japanese rival Mr. Goto (Kenichi Endo).

A third gangster, the oily Bejo (Alex Abbad) also wants a piece of the action.

Raid 2 chalks up assaultive accomplishments with piston-like efficiency.

Among its more memorable battles: a fight in a muddy prison yard and a subway confrontation with Hammer Girl (Julie Estelle).

Much of the action is well done, but at a two-and-a-half hour length, it's difficult not to wonder whether even martial arts fans will find Raid 2 excessive. Alternately bracing and bruising, Raid 2 can be impressive without always being fun.

Put another way: I frequently found myself unsure whether to applaud or beg for mercy.

This 'Raid' is one big bruising blur

Wreaking havoc in a tenement in Indonesia.

Movies that traffic in exaggerated violence have been known to serve up smorgasbords of brutally intense fun.

The Raid: Redemption, a film set in an Indonesian tenement and directed by Welsh-born Gareth Huw Evans, has some of the desired intensity, but comes up way short in the fun department.

Blame the movie's non-stop action, which tends to feel as numbing and meaningless as a routine story in which an elite SWAT team invades a shabby apartment building run by an Indonesian drug lord. I have no martial arts knowledge, but I do know that The Raid: Redemption delivers a pounding that often feels more relentless than artful.

Rama (Iko Uwais) -- the movie's ostensible main character -- is a young cop who bids his pregnant wife farewell on an early morning, and heads off to join his fellow officers for the raid.

The object: to take down Tama (Ray Sahetapy), the calm but vicious drug lord who runs the hotel/apartment complex which serves as headquarters for the drug trade and which also houses a few innocents who have nothing to do with criminal activity.

Judging by the increasingly shattered look of the already dilapidated building, the residents of will be lucky to make it out alive, much less get their damage deposits back.

The screenplay tries for a little depth, adding bits of story involving betrayal and brotherly conflict, but all that really counts here is the floor-by-floor battle for turf.

As is the case with many martial arts movies, bodies are abused in ways that defy every thing we know about human flesh and bone. At one point, a man's head repeatedly is smashed into a concrete floor. Rather than being carted off to the morgue, the fellow rises to resume fighting.

No one expects total verisimilitude in movies as wild as this, but it's difficult to locate a rooting interest amid Raid's highly compressed blr of bullets and flying bodies. For all its amped-up violence, Raid Redemption offers far too little invigorating kick.