The U.S. Trailer for Headshot Presents the Film That Just Might Hold Us Over Until The Raid 3

For those of us who can’t stand waiting years for The Raid 3—a film whose predecessors became instant action-movie benchmarks on account of their savage, dance-like fight choreography and energetic-yet-lucid cinematography—Headshot is a godsend. For all intents and purposes, it might as well be The Raid 3 itself. Like the Raid films, Headshot is a martial arts picture set within the Indonesian criminal underworld, and like those films, it stars the unstoppable Iko Uwais, the miraculous athletic specimen who has demonstrated his ability to bring the pain in the most jaw-dropping of ways. Julie Estelle, previously a badass, deaf-mute, hammer-wielding assassin in The Raid 2, here plays another variation of the deadly dame, and in Headshot’s new trailer, which just dropped, there’s even a point-blank shootout between two small armies that is virtually identical to one of the deleted scenes from the second Raid film. Normally, such similarity is a cause for concern, but in the case of Headshot, more of the same (not excluding the importance of some innovation, of course) just might be the film’s strongest asset.

As usual, the story is of minimal interest, and if there’s one fault to the new trailer (aside from the unnecessary English-language voiceover), it’s that it spends too much time expounding hackneyed plot points when everyone knows that Headshot’s main draw lies in the smackdowns. It takes nearly two minutes for the trailer to navigate past a premise that cribs from Jason Bourne (an amnesiac with major skills ends up in the ocean) and Taken (the hero becomes a one-man army to save the one he loves), but the fleeting bursts of violence at the trailer’s end are well worth the wait. These final snatches of footage show knives slashing, fists pummeling and guns blazing. Like the second Raid film, Headshot seems to hop around different locations—forest, warehouse, office building, beach—each of which becomes a unique stage on which the film’s balletic action can unfold.

Check out the full trailer above, and see also a couple of Headshot’s NSFW previous trailers here and here. The movie hits theaters worldwide on March 3, and if Headshot is as similar to The Raid films as it seems from the trailer, you’ll want to catch the film on the largest screen possible.