This year’s Sundance Festival has already produced a large number of critical darlings, with these fest faves being mostly touching comedies and dramas. And today there’s going to be whole lot of “touching” once again, only this time it will be fists, feet, knees, elbows and whatever makeshift weapons come to hand brutally touching some poor sods’ face, as Gareth Evans’ The Raid 2: Berandal is making its festival debut. And to commemorate the violence, a new trailer has been released.
He thought it was over. After fighting his way out of a building filled with gangsters and madmen – a fight that left the bodies of police and gangsters alike piled in the halls – rookie Jakarta cop Rama thought it was done and he could resume a normal life. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
Formidable though they may have been, Rama’s opponents in that fateful building were nothing more than small fish swimming in a pond much larger than he ever dreamed possible. And his triumph over the small fry has attracted the attention of the predators farther up the food chain. His family at risk, Rama has only one choice to protect his infant son and wife: He must go undercover to enter the criminal underworld himself and climb through the hierarchy of competing forces until it leads him to the corrupt politicians and police pulling the strings at the top of the heap.
And so Rama begins a new odyssey of violence, a journey that will force him to set aside his own life and history and take on a new identity as the violent offender “Yuda.” In prison he must gain the confidence of Uco – the son of a prominent gang kingpin – to join the gang himself, laying his own life on the line in a desperate all-or-nothing gambit to bring the whole rotten enterprise to an end.
It looks like Evans has seriously ramped up the scale of, well, everything for this trailer. While the first film was almost claustrophobic in its setting, this seems to be a sprawling venture, introducing all new environment for star Iko Uwais to bounce people’s heads off of during the film’s 148 minute running time.
It’s still not clear exactly how the very fittingly named Hammer Girl fits into this story, but judging from this trailer, she certainly lays down her fair share of smack. We also get to see the scene hinted at in that animated gif released yesterday, as well as a much clearer and longer look at the scene Evans has been talking about for a while, which will see a three-way fist fight breaking out in a car, during a high speed car chase. And based on these visuals, it looks every bit as crazy as it sounds.
The Raid 2: Berandal stars Iko Uwais, Julie Estelle, Alex Abbad, Marsha Timothy, Mathias Muchus, Tio Pakusadewo, and Cecep Arif Rahman, and will be released internationally on March 28, 2014.
Last Updated: January 22, 2014
RinceThis2014
January 22, 2014 at 10:03
When does it come out in the US of A so I can stream it? 🙂
James Francis
January 22, 2014 at 13:10
Hmmm, I’m still on the fence. The first Raid had good set pieces, but a really plodding script and at times seemed to get a little lost. Don’t forget that the first film’s trailer was also all-action, but the film itself had a bad habit of taking irregular pauses and not deciding how much character development it wanted to do. That left several big plot holes that kept it, imo, from reaching the level reserved for films like Ong Bak.