I can't disagree with anything you've written.
1000% agreed about the mishandling of Rama's brother at the beginning of Raid 2. It was senseless and completely deflated my care for anything that happened in the film.
That brutal kitchen fight with the one guy was kind of interesting as Rama had to learn to adapt and evolve in the fight, but I didn't really care because it's not like we had any reason to understand why Rama suddenly became Bruce Lee/Donnie Yen in that fight other than he just did. One thing I like about Donnie Yen films is that he usually sets up the logic and story of the fights perfectly.
For instance, in Flashpoint he's a cop who's brutal with a temper and brawls using a lot of Jiu-Jitsu. So it made sense at the end that in the fight with Collin Chow we had Collin being the faster and more precise striker while Yen's character focused on counters and submission-holds, just until they both got tired and then Yen went into beast mode, but without changing his character's fight profile, if that makes sense. Same with Special ID, IP Man, and SPL Killzone.
But meh, I'm way off on a tangent. Anyway, yeah I would have preferred if The Raid 2 was a lot more consistent and coherent with what it wanted to be. It was basically like a fight-porn version of the South Korean film New World, the latter of which was VASTLY superior as it did the Donnie Broscoe thing better than Donnie Broscoe thanks to its chess-like approach to the storytelling and character development.
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