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Thread: The Raid 2 (aka Berandal) starring Iko Uwais

  1. #16
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    This is looking really promising.

    Follow the link for the vid.
    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.


    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.
    Gene Ching
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  2. #17
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    EW review

    This is playing really close to me.
    Movie Review
    The Raid 2 (2014)
    MPAA Rating: R
    Reviewed by Chris Nashawaty on Mar 26, 2014 @ChrisNashawaty


    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'κtre 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+
    Gene Ching
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  3. #18
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    Just bought tickets, going tonight.

    Hype.

  4. #19
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    Son of Kickpuncher

    http://grantland.com/hollywood-prosp...res-of-raid-2/

    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.

  5. #20
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    You're lucky it played in your market, wenshu

    It was only released in 7 theaters last weekend, but that expands to more this weekend.

    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
    Gene Ching
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  6. #21
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    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.

  7. #22
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    So it's not a martial arts film because it has a plot?

    '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.


    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."
    "...character arcs within the fight scenes." how novel...
    Gene Ching
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  8. #23
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    Now at 26 theaters

    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
    It opens in my 'hood this weekend. Looking forward to catching this then.
    Gene Ching
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  9. #24
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    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.

  10. #25
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    Catch this in the theaters now. Support it.

    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.
    Quote Originally Posted by GeneChing View Post
    But it's really about Iko's choreography. He's the new young turk to watch in martial arts films.
    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.
    Gene Ching
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  11. #26
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    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.
    Last edited by Jimbo; 04-14-2014 at 10:10 AM.

  12. #27
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    I feel ya, Jimbo

    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.

    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
    Gene Ching
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  13. #28
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    Quote Originally Posted by GeneChing View Post
    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.
    The baseball bat sight-gag is worth the price of admission alone.

    dat kitchen scene tho

  14. #29
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    Quote Originally Posted by Jimbo View Post
    And he truly understands how to capture the action as well as the most from his actors.
    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.


    Mad Dog's subplot was great; I loved his introduction.
    Last edited by wenshu; 04-15-2014 at 11:05 AM.

  15. #30
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    [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.


    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.

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