An hour and a half earlier than promised due to overwhelming demand, the teaser trailer for Gareth Evans' The Raid 2: Berandal - arguably the most anticipated action movie of next year - is now online, thanks to the lovely chaps at TwitchFilm, and it rocks.
It's a true teaser, giving us a basic and very intriguing set-up. Iko Uwais' supercop, Rama, survivor of The Raid, is now sitting in a prison cell. How he got there, or why, remains a mystery, but he certainly doesn't look happy about it - as he demonstrates in no uncertain terms by punching the crap out of a silhouette on the wall.
As he does so, we get brief flashes of just some of the colourful characters that Rama will meet, greet and in all likelihood grind into meat on his murky journey into the underbelly of the Indonesian crime scene. Some - like Cecep Rahman's Assassin or Julie Estelle's Hammer Girl - are new faces. Others, like Tegar Satrya's Bowo and Yayan Ruhian, we've seen before, although, just to make it interesting, Ruhian - so memorable as Mad Dog in The Raid - is a new character here, the gray-haired enforcer Prakoso.
Finishing off with brief shots that hint at the film's bloody mayhem and larger scale (there's a hint of a car chase, and a setpiece in an Indonesian mall), it's a mouthwatering taste of a film that has pretty big shoes to fill. Enjoy.
**The Raid 2: Berandal **is out in 2014.