Director Gareth Evans spills some details on Berandal, the sequel to The Raid: Redemption

January 3rd 2013, 11:57am

A little movie called THE RAID: REDEMPTION kicked the shit out of me last year, becoming one of the most surprisingly awesome action movies I’d seen in a long time. The film garnered high praise from critics and audiences alike and has since gone on to reach a cult-level status of badassery-and much deserved. Now, director Gareth Evans has spilled the beans on a few details relating to the sequel, entitled BERANDAL (Indonesian for “thug”).

Have a look:

Ok Raid 2 tidbit, we start shooting on January 19th and the first scene takes place 2hrs after the first film ends.

— Gareth Evans (@ghuwevans) January 2, 2013

So, what does that mean? Is our main hero, Rama (Iko Uwais) going to get any recovery time after the massive amount of kicks to the face and body slams he took in the first film? Likely. Keep in mind, Evans says that only the first scene takes place 2 hours after the first film’s ending. Not that we need a “realistic” set-up per se, as I’m pretty confident ol’ Rama reached superhero status about midway through the film.

Evans spoke earlier with Collider about his approach to the sequel eariler last year, saying, “I told you earlier about a film that we tried to get up off the ground and couldn’t get done. While I was developing ‘The Raid,’ I was looking at ways to kind of link those two scripts together because we had done all this choreography on that first film, we were like ready to go we just needed the finance to pull the trigger on it. Because I didn’t want to just abandon that project, I started to look at ways we could link the two together. So the one problem I had with that original script was that the lead role didn’t have an interesting enough backstory.”

Evans continued, saying, “As I was thinking about it, I thought ‘Well if I make this a continuation of the story from ‘The Raid,’ it’ll work much better, and it’ll kind of add more ideas and add more different elements to it,’ so it’s actually gonna be the sequel to ‘The Raid.’ We’re in a position now where we can finance that movie, which is great [laughs]. So yeah, it’s a big relief now. For three years that’s been the itch I couldn’t scratch, so I’m kind of dying to kind of get stuck in and do that film next. That’ll be part two. Part three [will be] further down the line. A lot further down the line.”

After the pure awesomeness that was THE RAID: REDEMPTION, I’m beyond excited to see what Evans cooks up for the sequel. Working with a bigger budget of $3 million (the original cost $1 million to make) and taking the action into a new setting(s), I have high hopes for another knock-down, drag-out, kick ass flick.

No word on a release date, but with Evans super-fast shooting style, I wouldn’t be surprised if BERANDAL is screening by the end of the year. Stay tuned as this bad boy develops.