I just saw Merantau and loved it. Here's a trailer for Iko's second project, Berandal.
Berandal first teaser trailer 2010 (From Merantau starring "Iko Uwais")
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I just saw Merantau and loved it. Here's a trailer for Iko's second project, Berandal.
Berandal first teaser trailer 2010 (From Merantau starring "Iko Uwais")
We're discussing The Raid here.
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Sony Nabs U.S. Rights For ‘The Raid’ Sequel
By BRIAN BROOKS | Thursday February 2, 2012 @ 5:44pm
Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group has pre-bought U.S., Latin American and Spanish rights to the upcoming sequel to Indonesian action feature The Raid, which won the Midnight Madness Award at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Tentatively titled Berandal for the Indonesian market, production will start at the end of 2012 in Jakarta. Raid star Iko Uwais will return and Gareth Huw Evans is set to direct and produce through his PT Merantau Films. LA-based XYZ Films is also on board as producer. International sales are being handled by Celluloid Nightmares, the foreign sales partnership between XYZ Films and Celluloid Dreams. Alliance/Momentum has pre-bought for the United Kingdom and Canada; Koch Media has acquired the film for German speaking territories; Korea Screen has pre-bought Korea; and HGC has pre-bought China. Deals for other major territories are currently in negotiations. The new installment will have a “significantly larger budget” than the original, producers say, although storyline details are being kept quiet. The Raid, which will screen at the upcoming SXSW Film Festival, follows an elite SWAT team sent to raid an impenetrable safe house in the Indonesian capital’s slums. Sony Pictures Classics is releasing The Raid theatrically on March 23rd and Screen Gems is planning an English-language remake which XYZ Films is also producing. XYZ is an LA-based production and sales company founded by Nate Bolotin, Nick Spicer, and Aram Tertzakian.
I'm not sure if Raid 2 is in fact Berandal or not. If confirmed that it's not, we'll split this into a separate thread. In earlier interviews on the Raid thread, it implied that it was. Obviously, it's smarter for them to follow up on the franchise as Berandal is a nonsense word for most of us. If it is, we can always retitle this thread too.
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Uwais preparing for role in 'Raid 2'
Published: 26/11/2012 at 01:49 PM
Online news: Asia
Martial arts superstar Iko Uwais has confirmed he will take a lead role in a sequel to The Raid: Redemption.
The action thriller, a showcase for the traditional Indonesian martial art of pencak silat, follows an elite SWAT team's doomed mission to capture a Jakarta crime boss and has been a surprise hit worldwide since its release in 2011.
"We've been preparing the choreography so far but we have not yet determined when we're going to shoot the movie," Uwais told Antara News.
Director Gareth Evans confirmed earlier this year that the sequel has the working title of The Raid: Retaliation, with filming expected to begin in January 2013.
"We'll announce the actors and when we shoot the movie on December 20," producer Ario Sagantoro told Antara News.
Hammer Girl. Nice. ;)Quote:
The Raid 2 Berandal Gains New Cast Members
Julie Estelle, Oka Antara and Marsha Timothy join Iko Uwais in Gareth Evans' sequel.
Posted 21st December 2012, 1:12pm in Film
Some casting news for the sequel to this year's action hit The Raid (or The Raid: Redemption as it's known in the US).
Writer and director Gareth Evans and star Iko Uwais are following up their Indonesian martial arts epic with Berandal, which is weeks away from production.
THERAIDMOVIE on Twitter have revealed Indonesian model and actress Julie Estelle (Macabre) will take on the role of Hammer Girl, with the director revealing in a tweet that she's "not a heroine, she's a villain, but one that uses dual claw hammers while fighting in a style that resembles tiger style silat".
Indonesian rapper and actor Oka Antara will play Eka, while Evans' Merantau star Alex Abbad and The Forbidden Door's Marsha Timothy have also signed on. Local stars Arifin Putra, Mathias Muchus and Tio Pakusadewo round out the cast.
Evans also revealed that renowned silat practitioner Cecep Arif Rahman is also involved - star Uwais wowed in the first film with his skills at this particular martial art.
While The Raid - Die Hard meets Assault on Precinct 13 meets Hard Boiled - boasted some incredible fight sequences, Berandal promises much more. When we spoke to Evans earlier this year, he revealed one idea: "The action sequences this time are much bigger in scale, and larger in scope. Our big set piece for the sequel is going to be Iko versus four guys, inside a moving car on the motorway. We're going to have him kick people out of windows, and smash the car into other vehicles."
Two hours of downtime between films for Iko's character. Nice!
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'Raid: Redemption' Director Teases Sequel Details
Posted 21 hours ago by Kevin P. Sullivan in News
Gareth Evans has been discussing a sequel to "The Raid: Redemption" for quite some time now. Currently known only by its Indonesian name, "Berandal" will continue the story of the unstoppable badass machine Rama (Iko Uwais) and, as far as we knew before, was supposed to start production sometime this year.
Now via his Twitter feed, Evans has cleared up a few lingering mysteries about filming "Berandal" and when the story will pick up.
Evans revealed that the sequel would pick up a mere two hours after Rama escapes the criminal-infested high-rise, and from the way Evans described the bigger threat this time around, things sound like they're going to go from bad to worse quickly.
Gareth Evans @ghuwevans
Ok Raid 2 tidbit, we start shooting on January 19th and the first scene takes place 2hrs after the first film ends.
1 Jan 13
Evans spoke with MTV News all the way back before the US premiere of "The Raid" last year (you can watch the video above) and ran down some general points of "Berandal" without getting too specific. "The sequel is going to be a big departure in a way, in that we won't just copy the same formula as the first film," Evans said.
"It's not going to be set within one building this time. Everything that was terrifying about the boss in that building in the first movie is small fry compared to the criminal organization we meet in the second film. We take it out into the streets, go much wider and much bigger in terms of the scope."
I can't wait. At this moment, the work of Gareth Evans and Iko Uwais is the only thing in cinematic MA action that I'm really looking forward to with anticipation. The stuff out of Thailand seems to have ground to a halt or become stale. The stuff out of China/Hong Kong is on life support, and most of what's good completely depends on Donnie Yen.
Who would have thought that Indonesia would be 'the place' for the best MA movie action at a given time?
Interesting to see how this coattails on The Raid.
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Berlin 2013: XYZ Films Launches International Sales Arm
7:47 AM PST 2/12/2013 by Pamela McClintock
The new division gives the LA-based outfit the ability to assist filmmakers from start to finish in securing worldwide distribution.
BERLIN -- Los Angeles-based production and sales outfit XYZ Films is launching an international sales division that will unveil the first titles on its slate at the Cannes Marche du Film in May.
XYZ International will handle sales on third-party titles projects consistent with the company's commitment to filmmaker-driven, elevated genre films with broad commercial appeal, as well as on many of XYZ’s in-house production titles. The company will also continue to specialize in handling North American sales for an eclectic array of films from around the world.
Launched in 2009 by Nate Bolotin, Nick Spicer and Adam Tertzakian, XYZ Films' slate includes The Raid: Redemption, which Sony Pictures Classics released earlier this year. Todd Brown joined XYZ as partner in 2009.
“We’re very excited to start the next chapter of XYZ Films,” said Bolotin, who will oversee sales for XYZ International. “We’re now equipped to enable filmmakers from start to finish: inception to worldwide distribution.”
XYZ and PT Merantau Films are currently in production on The Raid 2, which reunites writer-director Gareth Huw Evans with actor Iko Uwais, who will be reprising his starring role. Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions (SPWA) has acquired rights to the sequel in several territories, while Sony Classics will once again release the film theatrically in the U.S.
XYZ and Merantau are also in post-production on Killers, co-directed by Timo Tjahjanto and Kimo Stamboel, with Evans and Rangga Maya Barack-Evans executive producing. Evans and Tjahjanto recently collaborated on Safe Haven.
On the of the Berlin Film Festival, XYZ premiered Dutch filmmaker Richard Raaphorst’s Frankenstein Army at Rotterdam and Calvin Lee Reeder’s The Rambler at Sundance.
Additional, XYZ is acting as executive producers on the upcoming supernatural thriller Aguas Rojas. Participant Media is financing the film, which is a co-production between Colombia’s Dynamo and Spain’s Apaches.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG9uFX3uYq4
Follow the link for the newest trailer
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Hot Trailer: ‘The Raid 2′
By JEN YAMATO | Tuesday January 21, 2014 @ 11:37am PST
Sony Pictures Classics has released a new action-packed trailer for Gareth Evans‘ martial arts sequel The Raid 2 ahead of its Sundance bow tonight. This is a hot ticket in Park City where the first Raid film screened after making a splashy debut at Toronto in 2011. Iko Uwais reprises his role as Rama, the Jakarta cop who battled his way through a tenement filled with criminals in the first pic only to go undercover in the sequel to uncover the corrupt baddies at the top of the food chain. Arifin Putra, Tio Pakusadewo, Oka Antara, and Julie Estelle join the fray in The Raid 2 which also sees the return of Raid actor/stunt choreographer Yayan Ruhian. SPC releases The Raid 2 on March 28 but they’re not the only studio banking on the Raid team. Yesterday at Sundance RADiUS-TWC pre-bought North American rights to Evans’ next project, The Night Takes Us, to be directed by Timo Tjahjanto (Killers) and produced by Evans with original Raid cast members starring. Watch the new Raid 2 trailer:
March. Cool. I'll be there.Quote:
The Raid 2 Star Iko Uwais Does Martial Arts Demo at Sundance
In Movies by Daniel Anderson
22 January, 2014
http://www.clickonline.com/Common/He...7845075d47cb2e
The Raid 2 Star Iko Uwais Does Martial Arts Demo at Sundance
Showing off the silat moves that kill a lot of people in his new movie
The Raid 2 just premiered at Sundance 2014 and the reviews have been so mind blowingly good that we just can't wait to get our eyes on it when it goes on general release later in the year.
But if you want to get a taste of the awesome on offer during the film, you can check out some of the moves by star Iko Uwais on stage ahead of the world premiere screening in the States. The former truck driver turned action star/choreographer kicks some imaginary ass here, as his castmates and director Gareth Evans look on.
It's much more intimdating when he's killing you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHWdlMp-8OE
The Raid 2 is in cinemas in the States in March 2014 and around the world sometime after that.
Changing the title of this thread from "Berandal (aka RAID 2) starring Iko Uwais". Only we knew it first as Berandal. ;)
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Beyond Torture: How Gareth Evans' 'The Raid 2' Redefines Action Cinema
A Welsh visionary stakes his bloody claim at Sundance
By Logan Hill
January 23, 2014 11:50 AM
Tuesday night, following the premiere of The Raid 2 at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Twitter exploded with mouthwatering, hyperbolic fanboy glee, with attendees comparing the film to everything from The Godfather to The Dark Knight Rises and Children of Men. Welsh writer-director, Gareth Evans broke out with his stylish Indonesian-set action film Merantau in 2009, but his follow up, 2011's The Raid: Redemption, was unexpectedly (and unrelentingly) brutal: a claustrophobic nightmare turned action-lover's dream in quicksilver action star Iko Uwais battles his way through an entire building of mobsters and thugs, cracking skulls and bathroom tiles with vicious elbows, knuckles and knees. The hallway fights and stairwell stand-offs seem so painfully real, you didn't just feel sorry for the actors – you felt sorry for the walls.
Redemption was a landmark of tight, pressurized action filmmaking, and Evans immediately earned his reputation as one of film's finest directors of old-school, hand-to-hand visceral violence. The Raid 2, in theaters March 28th, feels like what happens when all that contained fury is released on a much larger scale.
Running over two-and-a-half hours, the movie picks up with Uwais shortly after the end of the last film. An internal affairs cop asks him to infiltrate a crime syndicate by getting himself arrested, so he does. From there, the film marries the criminal scope of The Departed (or Infernal Affairs) to a kind of virtuoso, kinetic violence that goes far beyond shock-value torture porn. No matter how carefully the shots are framed and planned, every fight is dirty, and even the hundredth wincing, messy, eye-gouging, jaw-ripping entanglement feels like a rebuke to the over-choreographed ballet of so much of Hollywood's stylized, CGI-driven effects.
There's a prison riot, a gangland succession struggle, several hospitals-worth of blood splatter, a girl who one-ups Oldboy by wielding two hammers, a guy who finds himself face-to-grill with a hibachi and a how'd-they-do-that chase scene in which a camera passes in and out of two cars while fists fly. Most of the film's best shots are done in-camera with no CGI, and very few moments where the action is sped up. (Even the trailer's dramatic shot of Uwais furiously punching the wall is shot in real time.) In short, action cinema's been waiting for its next great talent. And with this film, Gareth Evans stakes his bloody claim. We spoke to him yesterday morning, after the raves started pouring in.
You finished the film 48 hours before its Sundance premiere. What was that like?
That was stress magnified. Unreal, man. Getting it done was hard and tough, but you could at least see progress. But the 24-hour wait before the first screening was nerve-wracking. Awful. The worst. I'm glad it seems to have played well.
The Raid: Redemption was a huge hit for action fans, but the scale was small. Did you set out with a goal to top that film with the two-and-a-half hours of The Raid 2?
It's a weird thing. There is that pressure. And we do want to make sure that everything we do is bigger and better than what we did previously. The biggest thing was to make sure that we don't repeat ourselves. We didn't want it to be contained in one building with the same structural layout. We wanted to expand the universe – to have a much bigger atmosophere and scale of production. And not just in terms of action. We wanted the scale of the drama, too.
It's also even more gruesome and brutal than Redemption, which you once said was partly a reaction to the fanboys who felt that the violence in Merantau was too soft.
The brutality is not an intentional thing, really. We design scenes according to whatever makes sense within the context of the film. The brutality comes from the characters, rather than us wanting to show something ****ed-up.
The MPAA hasn't rated it yet. How do you know when it's going too far?
I don't know. I don't really have a very good filter when I'm planning like that. "What's violent or not? I mean, on a ratings level?" I just try to make sure everything feels very instinctive or organic. It's really not for shock.
Twice in the film, someone says, "There's no clean war." That's a pretty good summary for your style of action, where it's choreographed but also very **** dirty.
Well, everyone on every corner of that film is steeped in this world of violence. There's no moment in any of these characters lives where they're sitting down on a Saturday night watching TV and having a glass of wine. Violence is in their lives on an everyday, every moment level.
How do you decide when to push it?
I want to question the audience: "How far will you follow this protagonist? What if he starts to do stuff that is worse than what the bad guys are doing?" I hope it makes you guys, the audience, ask: "Is this still my hero? Even if he's corrupted almost entirely by his experience?"
As a fan, who are the action directors you keep returning to?
It's always been John Woo, Sam Peckinpah and Jackie Chan. The way they orchestrated and shot action has always been the biggest influence. Because of my editing style – I edit my films and I'm not flashy – I can't do graphics and all the special stuff. I just like straight cuts and a more classical approach. And that lends itself more to the old style of action choreography and presenting action like Peckinpah or John Woo did: You establish the geography of the place. You don't get lost in a sea of edits. You leave enough breathing space to see where the choreography is going.
In that sense, your style is very different from the hyper-kinetic cross-editing of Christopher Nolan and Paul Greengrass. Are you responding to that style?
I shoot what I prefer to see and that's not it. I enjoy the hell out of the Bourne films, but the way I want to see it is different. I want to get that detail and have that clarity.
What scene was most satisfying to pull off?
The final fight in the kitchen – and the prison riot [Ed. Note – visible in the trailer above]. For that, we designed the shots to be able to be cut together and flow through the prison yard like it's a long single take, when in fact those shots are composed of six-to-eight or eight-to-ten shots. We shot for ten days, with 120 extras, in miserable, muddy conditions. I was by the monitors, but I lost my boots in the mud.
The sound design is sick. And sickening. How do you make it sound so real?
I tend to like to focus on the small details, and that can be as simple as the sound of a rip or splash of blood. All those little details have to be in there to give it extra focus and attention, and it all comes together to make the action choreography feel real.
I kept cringing. Which hit worked best for you?
I love the guy who gets kicked in the side of the head, goes flying and then his head is stopped by that concrete bench. I saw that head crack and thought, "This is really going to ****ing work."
You invented the character of Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man. Where did the idea for them come from? Are you a big baseball fan?
God no! If any of those came from anything personal, I'd be worried about my safety. They're figments of my imagination. Hammer Girl was an extension of the harimau, or tiger style, of silat martial arts. It involves open palms and clawing. I was looking for another weapon and thought, "Why not a couple of claw hammers?"
Follow the link for the vid.
I think I'm going to like Julie. With a name like 'hammer girl', it's hard not to like.
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Iko Uwais and Julie 'Hammer Girl' Estelle on how they survived 'The Raid 2'
They seem like such sweet and completely lethal kids
BY DREW MCWEENY MONDAY, JAN 27, 2014 10:50 PM
Iko Uwais and Julie Estelle discuss the making of 'The Raid 2' and the thrill of premiering the action sequel at Sundance 2014
PARK CITY - One of the craziest moments in the Keanu Reeves film "Man Of Tai Chi" comes near the conclusion when Tiger Hu Chen finally has to face his competition in the finals of the weird underground martial arts tournament he's been working his way through, and it turns out to be Iko Uwais from "The Raid" and "The Raid 2." When they enter the ring, I readied myself for the fight of all fights, and there's something perverse about the way Reeves has Tiger Hu Chen simply refuse the fight. That would be like having your hero battle his way into a room where Bruce Lee was, then having Bruce Lee shake his hand and walk away.
Iko Uwais does not look like an action icon at first glance. He's slight, with a boyish face, and he doesn't seem particularly imposing in terms of how he's built. The moment you see him explode into action, though, it's apparent that he's a natural, both graceful and powerful. He's also becoming a better actor from film to film. In "Merantau," he seems comfortable in the fight scenes but not nearly as comfortable with dialogue. By now, though, he's gotten very good, and there are several scenes in "The Raid 2" that are emotionally powerful and very simple, with no fighting at all involved.
Julie Estelle is going to make quite an impression on action fans in her role as Hammer Girl, one part of a deadly pair of assassins who work for a rising crime lord named Bejo in the movie. There's very little time spent setting up the backstory for Hammer Girl and her brother Baseball Bat Man, but the work she does suggests volumes about how she became a terrifying lethal weapon.
In person, she's delicate, but she seems ready to make the jump to English-language films immediately, and considering how convincing she is in "The Raid 2" and how well she helps establish a complicated character without a ton of dialogue, I hope this is the beginning of big things for her.
Together, Uwais and Estelle make a charming pair of representatives for the bone-pulverizing mayhem of "The Raid 2," and I think this is a great conversation.
"The Raid 2" arrives in theaters March 28, 2014.
home sick, i missed this :(
Belated birthday wishes to Iko Uwais who turned 31 2 days ago!
My way of celebrating, posted first set of 5 animated GIFs i made from the raid: redemption
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4pkLSZlbIl...tion-1a-sg.gif
4 more here:
http://www.stickgrappler.net/2014/02...wais-raid.html
Major bummer for the premiere.
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The Raid 2 SXSW premiere got cancelled so here’s two of its star fighting on stage instead
Thursday 13 Mar 2014 11:56 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F__6ipotEGQ
The Raid 2 director Gareth Evans found a good way to entertain fans after the premiere of his new film was cancelled at the last minute – by getting two of the stars to fight on stage.
Iko Uwais, who reprises his role as Rama in the action sequel, exchanged blows with co-star Cecep Arif Rahman at SXSW Festival on Sunday.
The screening was pulled at the last-minute due to technical issues which meant that un-subtitled version of the Indonesian film had been downloaded to the theatre’s servers.
http://metrouk2.files.wordpress.com/...4711554973.png
The Raid 2 stars fight on stage after premiere axedIko Uwais and Cecep Arif Rahman know how to entertain a crowd of The Raid fans (Picture: OneofUsNet/YouTube)
The punch-up, which seemed to be won by Cecep, was caught on camera by OneofUsNet.
Welsh director Evans recently told Crave Online that the next instalment, Raid 3, will be set just hours after the second one finishes.
He said: ‘I haven’t started it. I know the storyline for it. It’s set three hours before The Raid 2 finishes, so there’s a key moment in The Raid 2 where we go back and revisit that scene and as a result of that we branch off, so we go in a totally different direction then. That’s as much as I can say right now.
‘There are people involved in the second one that we expand a lot more in the third, which is probably pretty obvious now because most of the f***ers die.’
The Raid 2 is out in UK cinemas on April 11.
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The Raid 2 Review
Chris Tilly
Fists of Fun and Fury
→ March 13, 2014 The Raid rammed a rocket up the arse of the action movie genre when it hit screens back in 2011. And it came out of nowhere, being directed by Welshman in Indonesia Gareth Evans and starring the then unknown Iko Uwais as super-cop Rama.
But the tale of a police raid on a gangland high rise going very wrong was without doubt the action film of the year; the narrative tense and tight, the fight scenes brisk and brutal, and Uwais the kind of winning lead that it’s impossible not to root for.
This sequel opens the universe out, with story, scope and scale larger, and while it features several fight scenes that top those in the original, it also shows that you can have too much of a good thing, with The Raid 2's many characters and storylines meaning that at times you really feel the film’s near two-and-a-half hour run-time.
It starts off briskly enough, opening mere moments after the end of the first film, with Rama being de-briefed by senior officers about want went on in the building. And he quickly discovers that the many men he murdered were merely the tip of the criminal iceberg in Jakarta.
Wanting to clean the streets of both bad guys and dirty cops, his bosses claim that the only way Rama can continue the work he’s started is by going undercover. And while our hero is initially hesitant to to agree, the realisation that it's the only way to protect his family quickly makes the decision an easy one.
What follows is not unlike the Infernal Affairs films, albeit with a brutal action twist. Rama first heads to prison where his mission is to befriend U****, son of the local crime lord Bangun. He proves his worth during a tense bathroom stand-off, and a stunning fight sequence in the prison yard, and while it takes him months rather than weeks to complete his mission, he’s eventually out and rising up the ranks in Bangun’s organization.
And it’s here that the story becomes a little too convoluted for its own good. A war between Bangun’s family and their rivals the Goto clan is reignited. The angry and petulant Ucok endeavors to oust his father to take over the family buisness. The ruthless Bejo also has designs on that lofty position of power. And several more characters show up to complicate proceedings with their various plots and schemes.
So while its nice to see someone like Yayan Ruhian – so memorable as Mad Dog in the first film – returning to play an entirely new character, it does feel like he’s strolled in from an entirely different movie, and while his fight scenes are great, his story arc only really serves to slow proceedings down.
Conversely two fantastic additions to the series are Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man, characters who have little in the way of back-story or explanation, but who simply show up to cause maximum bloody carnage. And the film really comes to life whenever they are onscreen.
And if anything, Evans has got better at shooting these scenes, the writer-director brilliantly building tension in the build-up to each battle before delivering some truly jaw-dropping sequences.
Stand-outs include the aforementioned bathroom and prison yard scenes, but also a brilliantly choreographed chase sequence that features Rama fighting four assailants in a tiny car.
But best of the bunch is a lengthy kitchen brawl that finds our hero going one-on-one with a villainous equal, a scene in which we get up close-and-personal with Rama’s fists of fury as he brutally and mercilessly takes down his man.
Uwais is yet again fantastic in the lead, all snarling determination as he batters villain after villain. Special mention should also go to Arifin Putra whose snivelling Ucok is the film’s most interesting character.
And it looks great, with some sequences neon-lit nightmares, and others slow-motion masterpieces of bone-crunching brutality.
It’s just a shame that the script wasn’t tightened up a little to do away with some of the more pointless characters and extraneous sub-plots to make part two as lithe and fat-free as its predecessor.
The Verdict
The result is still probably the action movie of the year, but one that doesn’t quite hit the brilliantly thrilling heights of the original.
Follow the link for the vid.
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Watch a Backseat Beat Down in 'The Raid 2' Fight Scene
By Matt McDaniel 17 hours ago Yahoo Movies
And you thought your commute was tough.
In this exclusive action scene from "The Raid 2," you really get to see how director Gareth Evans has expanded the scope from his original film while still retaining the claustrophobic feel of the action scenes. Star Iko Uwais returns as Rama, an Indonesian cop standing up against the forces of corruption. In this scene, he's being held hostage in the back seat of a car when it gets rear-ended by his partner. And that's the opening he needs to turn the tables on his captors using just his blindingly fast fists and feet.
The original "The Raid: Redemption" confined the action to one apartment building, and Evans was able to use the limited space to amp up the tension. For the sequel, Evans has opened it up, spreading out the action across the city of Jakarta. But he still finds ways to trap his characters in small, awkward spaces and let them fight their way out. Hong Kong stunt coordinator Bruce Law — he's the guy who got a motorcycle to jump onto a moving train in Jackie Chan's "Supercop" — was brought in to supervise the action.
https://s3.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/a..._fight_gs2.jpg
Director Gareth Evans filming 'The Raid 2' (Sony Pictures Classics)
Evans knew going into it that they wouldn't have the budget to compete with the over-the-top car action that you'd see in an American movie like "Fast & Furious." He said, "My focus on those scenes was more on what happens to the bodies inside the car: drivers, passengers when their car gets hit, which gives a unique selling point to me and made it different from things what we’ve seen previously." But they were still able to build a bus terminal like you'd see on the street in Indonesia just so they could ram a car right through it.
Check back next week when we'll have Gareth Evans's director's commentary on how they made this scene happen. "The Raid 2" opens in select cities on Friday.
This is playing really close to me. :D
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Movie Review
The Raid 2 (2014)
MPAA Rating: R
Reviewed by Chris Nashawaty on Mar 26, 2014 @ChrisNashawaty
http://img2-1.timeinc.net/ew/i/2014/...d-2-Review.jpg
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ART Iko Uwais and Cecep Arif Rahman amp up the action in the sequel to just the right place.
Image credit: Akhirwan Nurhaidir and Gumilar Triyoga
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ART Iko Uwais and Cecep Arif Rahman amp up the action in the sequel to just the right place.
EW's GRADE
B+
Details Release Date: Mar 28, 2014; Rated: R; Length: 148 minutes; With: Iko Uwais; Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Go bigger or go home. Since the dawn of the action-sequel era, that's been the most golden of golden rules. Audiences can't be expected to dig into their pockets to see more of the same. We want splashier F/X, crazier car chases, and crunchier bone crunching. No, we demand it. And for the most part, the studios (both here and abroad) have been only too happy to supersize their sequels.
Back in the '80s — the heyday of give-the-people-what-they-want action encores — George Miller's postapocalyptic demolition derby The Road Warrior took the brooding engine that drove Mad Max and fuel-injected it with nihilistic gonzo mayhem. James Cameron took Ridley Scott's Alien, a claustrophobic old-dark-house chiller in space, and opened it up into a macho rock-'em-sock-'em spectacle. And soon enough Cameron would even outdo himself with his sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Who would've guessed when Ah-nuld prophetically barked the first film's ''I'll be back'' catchphrase that he'd return with a budget more than 10 times the size of the original and all the eye-candy visual pyrotechnics it could buy? This wasn't just a passing fad. It was a new way of doing business — one that's still very much alive today. Recently, 300: Rise of an Empire goosed the Grecian formula of the original, adding gallons more gore and upcharging for 3-D specs, while the Fast & Furious franchise pushes the envelope so far with each new chapter that Fast 7 will basically have to be a two-hour fireball.
All of which brings us to the latest go-for-broke action sequel, The Raid 2, an Indonesian cavalcade of carnage directed by Welsh filmmaker Gareth Evans. The movie's whole raison d'être is to give its action-junkie fan base more (more martial-arts fight scenes, more bloodbath insanity) and push that excess to its giddiest, goriest extreme. When Evans' first chapter, The Raid: Redemption, hit theaters in 2012, it already set the thrill-kill bar pretty high. It was an exquisitely rigged mousetrap of ultraviolence, pitting an elite team of cops against a ruthless underworld kingpin whose lair lay atop a 15-story tenement. Floor by floor, they had to methodically slash and hack their way to their target like they were sadistic avatars in the world's most demented videogame. How do you top something like that?
Evans' answer? Lip-smacking brutality and balletic style. Rama (Iko Uwais), the hero of the first film, returns, and now he's looking for payback. He's tapped to go undercover to infiltrate the same Mob he fought in the first movie and move up the organizational ladder. The mole-in-the-underworld setup will be familiar to fans of 2002's Hong Kong epic Infernal Affairs and its 2006 American remake, The Departed. But this long-con game (and it is long; The Raid 2 is easily a half hour longer than it needs to be) is merely window dressing for the movie's real MO — namely, its dozen or so fight sequences, which are so bananas they make their Jackie Chan/Bruce Lee predecessors look as flat-footed and innocuous as a Three Stooges short. There are brawls with aluminum baseball bats that bounce off skulls with the tinny sound of a steel-drum solo, a female assassin (Julie Estelle) armed with a pair of flesh-flaying claw hammers, and demented fists-of-fury beatdowns in the tightest of spaces, including a squalid prison toilet stall and the backseat of a speeding car.
This particular brand of look-through-your-fingers-if-you-dare savagery is not for everyone. You'll either dial right into the film's feverish frequency or head for the concession stand. But if it's more that you're after, then The Raid 2 will make you feel like Christmas came nine months early. Some action sequels don't know when to say when. But here's one where too much is just the right amount. B+
Just bought tickets, going tonight.
Hype.
Son of Kickpuncher
http://grantland.com/hollywood-prosp...res-of-raid-2/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MuXrN8L9roQuote:
There are fans to be serviced. You want to see Welsh action auteur Gareth Evans’s first car chase — which, in true Evans style, is a car chase that also includes a full-on backseat fistfight, and unfolds in a series of hanging-out-the-window handheld shots you won’t believe didn’t cost the production the price of a Red camera or the life of a DP? You got it. You want to see Halloween 2014’s Gogo Yubari today? Meet Julie Estelle as the mute assassin ID’d in the credits only as “Hammer Girl,” who looks like she walked out of a J-pop version of Oldboy. Even Yayan Ruhian, who played a merciless henchman named “Mad Dog” in the first film and died at the end, gets to come back as a new character, fighting off a 50-man ambush in a two-story disco while sporting an amazing wig that makes him look like Gandalf the Homeless.
It was only released in 7 theaters last weekend, but that expands to more this weekend.
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The Raid 2
Domestic Total as of Mar. 30, 2014: $177,000
Distributor: Sony Classics Release Date: March 28, 2014
Genre: Foreign / Action Runtime: 2 hrs. 28 min.
MPAA Rating: R Production Budget: N/A
Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic: $177,000
Domestic Summary
Opening Weekend: $177,000
(7 theaters, $25,286 average)
% of Total Gross: 100.0%
> View All Weekends
Widest Release: 7 theaters
In Release: 3 days / 0.4 weeks
Easily the best action movie of the last 20 years. Perhaps the best action movie I have ever seen. I enjoyed The Raid, thought it showed some potential but having been disappointed so many times by the promise of action franchises didn't really expect too much until I saw the trailers. Gareth And Uwais deliver far above and beyond that promise on every conceivable level.
The only real flaw was that the writing didn't really do much to distinguish the characters; with the notable exception of the main antagonist assassins who do a tremendous amount with very little, the only thing going on character wise are vague motivations derived from their position in the story. Fortunately this flaw is easily overlooked when you have arguably some of the most beautifully shot action choreography in action movie history, perfectly timed comic relief, understated homages to its classic forbears and a very satisfying conclusion to all the build up of the visceral brutality of the last 2 hours.
That last point can't be emphasized enough, after 2 hours of watching a gangster henchmen beat down assembly line I was worried that the conclusion would disappoint by just rehashing the same formula. But the film delivers to the very end; the last 30 minutes of the film are probably twice as good as the (the very good) first 120.
You know an action movie is good when the audience is erupting in cheers and applause at the conclusion of a scene. The car chase was especially raucous.
"...character arcs within the fight scenes." how novel...:rolleyes:Quote:
'The Raid 2' director Gareth Evans on why it isn't a martial arts film
'The Raid 2' filmmaker Gareth Evans discusses Iko Uwais, the movie's chess-like car chase, pencak silat and playing with genres.
http://www.trbimg.com/img-533a17eb/t...g-20140331/600
Gareth Evans, seated, director of "The Raid 2" with the film's star, Iko Uwais. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
By Mark Olsen
April 1, 2014, 5:30 a.m.
The history of action cinema has a long tradition of international cross-cultural pollination, as films from one country inspire filmmakers from another. Directors such as Sam Peckinpah, Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, John Woo and Quentin Tarantino learned and borrowed from one another, adding to the vibrancy of the genre.
So why shouldn't one of the freshest, most exciting new voices in martial arts action be a Welshman living and working in Indonesia?
With his new film "The Raid 2," filmmaker Gareth Evans — credited as director, writer, co-editor and action choreographer — confirms himself as a force in international action cinema. In the film, a cop named Rama (Iko Uwais), having fought through a high-rise full of murderous drug dealers in 2011's "The Raid: Redemption," is sent to prison to go undercover, becoming part of a dangerous underworld in which warring gangs are locked in a bloody power struggle.
Along the way Evans stages a large-scale prison riot, a dazzling car chase and assorted battles of varying sizes most anywhere people can fight, utilizing hammers, guns, blades and plain old fist-to-body fighting, building to an extended one-on-one showdown in a restaurant kitchen.
The film opened last weekend to strong reviews and a per-screen average of more than $25,000, the best of the weekend, on its way to expanding to some 1,200 screens on April 11. It also had the biggest opening day of all time in Indonesia.
Yet for all the bloody mayhem and intense martial arts action, Evans also keeps the complex matrix of shifting allegiances of the film's dramatic storytelling at its forefront. It's as if "The Raid 2" is both a grungy Asian action film and its classy Hollywood remake fused together, "Infernal Affairs" and "The Departed" rolled into one.
"For me it has to work as a story first," said Evans during a recent stop in Los Angeles. "It doesn't work if the action is just kind of thrown in.... What I wanted to try to do in this one is make sure each action scene, each beat, would be in response to the plot and push the plot forward. There would be character arcs within the fight scenes."
Born in Wales, Evans initially didn't envision himself as a martial arts action filmmaker, but rather something in the mold of classic European art house cinema, before making his debut with 2006's little-seen "Footsteps." His wife, Rangga Maya Barack-Evans, an executive producer on "The Raid 2," is half-Indonesian and provided Evans his first real contact to Indonesian culture. They traveled there for six months to make a documentary on martial arts, 2007's "The Mystic Art of Indonesia," and more or less never left.
It was while working on the documentary that Evans first met Uwais, his future star and collaborator, and a practitioner of the martial arts style known as pencak silat.
"Silat for me just looked so cinematic," said Evans. As for Uwais, then working as a messenger, Evans thought to himself, "This guy needs to be in films."
The pair worked together on a 2009 film, "Merantau," but it was when the first "Raid" opened the Midnight Madness section at the 2011 Toronto film festival, winning an audience award, that Evans and Uwais really announced their arrival on the international genre scene.
Uwais choreographed the martial arts fighting in "The Raid 2" along with Yayan Ruhian, also in the film, with Evans overseeing and handling other action. When the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year to a rapturous response, Uwais put on a brief demonstration during a post-show Q&A to answer an audience question as to whether he could really move that fast. (Answer: yes.)
Not that the question is unreasonable. As Uwais said in a later interview in Los Angeles, "There's a scene where I hit the wall very fast, that even I couldn't believe. I asked Gareth if he sped it up or did a camera trick and he said no, he hadn't touched anything."
Though Uwais pulls off the dramatic demands of the role quite handily, he added, "I'm afraid to be considered an actor. An actor has to be able to play many kinds of roles; I can only play a fighter."
The ambitious film went more than 20 days over schedule, with a total of 130 shooting days on a budget of $4.5 million. For the film's calamitous car chase sequence, Evans had only 10 cars total, a few of which had to be held back as replacements in case of crashes or mechanical problems. So rather than a typical smash 'em up, he created something different.
"I wanted to create almost like a game of chess with the cars," said Evans. "I said I want to focus on the people inside the cars rather than the car itself smashing. I wanted to be able to feel what's going on in the car."
Two crowd-pleasing additions to the new film are the characters of "Hammer Girl" and "Baseball Bat Man," played by Julie Estelle and Very Tri Yulisman, who are exactly as they sound — a pair of assassins whose weapons of choice are claw hammers and a bat and a ball. Evans intended them to push the boundaries of reality, just to the point of breaking.
"For me, 'The Raid 1' and 'The Raid 2' are not martial arts films," the filmmaker said. "'Raid 1' is survival horror, but the action is martial arts. And 'The Raid 2' is a gangster crime movie, but the action is martial arts. That's it. In 'The Raid 1,' what I wanted to do was try suspense, thriller, horror, action, gunplay, martial arts and fuse all these things together. For 'The Raid 2' it was can I take gangster tropes, yakuza elements, the crime drama, and bring in a comic-book style without pulling the boundaries of logic too tight."
When Evans introduced the film's premiere at Sundance, he noted to the crowd that the film was being shown to them "before the MPAA has a heart attack." Yet with only minimal changes, the film did receive an R rating — "I was pleasantly surprised there weren't too many notes," Evans said, considering the visceral intimacy of his body-ripping, bone-breaking style.
"For me if there's a certain amount of beauty you can find in something even if it's brutal," Evans said. "They way the camera responds to it, the way the edit comes out, it can be both graphically violent and beautiful.... When you get to the nitty-gritty of a fight, its grubby, it's dirty and it's violent. It's extreme but it also feels real."
It opens in my 'hood this weekend. Looking forward to catching this then.Quote:
RAID 2
Domestic: $351,766 100.0%
+ Foreign: n/a 0.0%
= Worldwide: $351,766
Domestic Summary
Opening Weekend: $165,292
(#23 rank, 7 theaters, $23,613 average)
% of Total Gross: 47.0%
> View All Weekends
Widest Release: 26 theaters
All I can say is...WOW.
Very good acting, interesting story, and awesome martial arts/action sequences. One of the greatest action movies, if not THE greatest, I've ever seen.
The only potential problem I can see is, where can they possibly go from here?!? OTOH, I'm filled with anticipation to see what Gareth Evans/Iko Uwais and their team bring next.
I don't care what you think you are doing in the next week or so. Run out and see this. It's not a little of the ol' ultravi. It's a huge heapin helping of maximum ultravi. I have this little chuckle when I see some fresh and amusing fight choreography. I'm sure many of you have heard it over the years but you might not have noticed. A good flick will get maybe two or three chuckles. In The Raid 2, I lost count.
This is Iko & Gareth's tour de force. It's gritty, bloody, visceral, not your family-friendly Forbidden Kingdom but hammers, baseball bats, pick axes, broken bottles, metal pipes, prison shanks, machetes, pistols to the forehead and shotguns to the face, with a judicious use of digital blood (which I usually disdain, but liked it here). Lots of blood, splattering everywhere. And given that it's Iko, who is a master of Silat, it has the best karambit fight so far. The choreography is superb from every angle, long extended sequences showing Iko's virtuosity, leg catches, headbutts, knee and elbow shots - fast, tight and well showcased with the camera work. What's more, there's even a decent plot with intriguing characters (gotta luv Hammer Girl and Baseball Bat Man). It's well shot, even artsy at points, which is an extra double+ bonus in this genre.
I told ya that Iko was a martial artist to watch.
This is the best martial arts flick of 2014, but the year is early. Offhand however, I can't think of a flick in 2013 that tops it.Quote:
Originally Posted by GeneChing
Gene,
I'm planning to go see it a second time...and nowadays, I NEVER see anything in a theater more than once. I enjoyed it that much. There's something about seeing a movie like this on the big screen that the little screen will never match.
IMO, Iko Uwais and company are the future of MA/action movies. Gareth Evans is an amazing director. Evans has really brought Indonesian films up and into the international spotlight, in such a short amount of time. What makes it really special is that virtually any other film director from the West would have gone into an Asian country and made the film about a European or American, and Euro/American main characters, and the country itself and its people would only be props to make them look good. But instead, Evans has truly made his films Indonesian, but with his own unique director's eye. In fact, offhand, I can't think of one other Westerner/director who has shown this level of immersion/respect. And he truly understands how to capture the action as well as the most from his actors.
It has spread to almost 1k+ theaters now. :)
All you forum peeps - listen to wenshu, Jimbo & me. See this in the theater NOW. You will be entertained. :cool:
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Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic: $1,369,797 100.0%
+ Foreign: n/a 0.0%
= Worldwide: $1,369,797
Domestic Summary
Release Dates: March 28, 2014 (limited)
April 11, 2014 (wide)
Limited Opening Weekend: $165,292
(#23 rank, 7 theaters, $23,613 average)
Wide Opening Weekend: $956,672
(#11 rank, 954 theaters, $1,003 average)
% of Total Gross: 69.8%
> View All 3 Weekends
Widest Release: 954 theaters
In Release: 17 days / 2.4 weeks
The baseball bat sight-gag is worth the price of admission alone.Quote:
Originally Posted by GeneChing
dat kitchen scene tho
Amazingly he elicits amazing performances from people who are not actors by training but martial artists.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jimbo
I don't remember The Assassin having more than a few lines if any but he brings pure unadulterated swagger to every scene.
http://www.empireonline.com/images/u...r-assassin.jpg
Mad Dog's subplot was great; I loved his introduction.
http://renegadecinema.com/wp-content...-2-Prakoso.jpg
[QUOTE=wenshu;1265307]Amazingly he elicits amazing performances from people who are not actors by training but martial artists.
I don't remember The Assassin having more than a few lines if any but he brings pure unadulterated swagger to every scene.
http://www.empireonline.com/images/u...r-assassin.jpg
I totally agree. The Assassin was oozing with confidence and menace.
I watched it again yesterday, and still say it's probably the best action movie I've seen. And I've seen way too many. It's truly character-driven, which completely eliminates the problems associated with most other MA/action films, in particular, modern-day (non-period) ones; that is, great fight scenes connected by weak storylines, cliched characters, and wooden acting. The Raid 2's characters and plot are well-paced and interesting, and it doesn't feel like a 2.5-hour movie. All the principle actors are comfortable in their dramatic scenes, and nobody appears uncomfortable onscreen when they aren't fighting. And I think that kitchen scene just *might* be my new favorite one-on-one fight scene.
I picked up the DVD and still love it. There are some possible issues when watching the DVD. I saw this movie 3 times during its theater run, and on the big screen, it's easy to take the distance shots for granted. But when watching the DVD, those same shots can become a bit annoying (unless you happen to have a gigantic TV, which I don't). In the theater, the distance shots can be understood; but on an average-sized TV, it's like trying to watch tiny ants. Otherwise, except for maybe a different line or two in the English subtitles (during the prison dining room scene), everything is as it was in the theatrical release.
I found the blu-ray on Amazon.
Not sure if it is the unrated or if there is an unrated version...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Raid-Blu-r...rds=the+raid+2
I thought this was the best movie I've seen in a long time. I really enjoyed the krambit scene at the end. Way unrealistic but fantastically brutal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG9uFX3uYq4