The upcoming Never Back Down: Revolt will change things up quite a bit for the Never Back Down series. Beginning with the original Never Back Down in 2008, the MMA series really found its groove with 2011's Never Back Down 2: The Beatdown, which also marked the directorial debut of Michael Jai White. The series later continued in 2016 with Never Back Down: No Surrender, with White once again directing. Never Back Down: Revolt will see Kellie Madison in the director's chair, while the movie itself will be quite a different entity from the three before it.
Revolt will see Olivia Popica play a woman who is kidnapped and forced to compete in an underground MMA tournament. While not much else has been revealed about the film aside from casting info (such as former MMA fighter Michael Bisping portraying one of the villains), this already shows that Revolt is raising the stakes considerably from those of the first three Never Back Down movies by bringing a kidnapping plot and an underground tournament into the mix like a throwback to the Bloodsport and Kickboxer movies.
The first three Never Back Down movies were full of punishing fight scenes and the training montages typical of martial arts tournament movies. Each also had their own antagonists engaged in underhanded villain plots, and to be sure, these got increasingly elaborate and Machiavellian, going from simple teenage high school drama in Never Back Down to the slimy politics of unscrupulous fight promoters in No Surrender. However, none of them truly dealt with the kind of life or death stakes that Revolt is diving head first into.
Additionally, Revolt also doesn't appear to have any direct connection to the movies before it in terms of characters or story, meaning that unless a surprise cameo by Michael Jai White or Evan Peters is being kept under wraps, Revolt will be the most standalone entry in the franchise. Of course, that isn't really a problem with the Never Back Down series specifically. This is because, even when the films occasionally share one or two of the same characters, they don't have all that much direct connection.
Never Back Down focused on a high school kid with anger issues learning to temper his rage through MMA, while The Beatdown followed a whole new set of characters. Despite Evan Peters' returning from the first film, the two movies mostly stood alone. No Surrender re-centered its focus on White's character Case Walker, the MMA mentor of The Beatdown, returning for an upcoming fight in Thailand, but the film was enough of a singular work that it didn't rely on viewers seeing either of its predecessors either. What they really had in common was their shared focus on MMA, with the latter two especially really hitting the mark with excellent action scenes.
Revolt is sure to feel like a change of pace for the Never Back Down series, but in a natural and fun way, its kidnapping and underground fighting plot elevating the stakes to their highest. The most important thing to carry over is, of course, the MMA element. With that aspect of the movie falling to Tim Man, who previously worked his magic on Ninja II: Shadow of a Tear, Boyka: Undisputed, Accident Man, and Triple Threat, coupled with Madison's work on the excellent action short The Gate, Never Back Down: Revolt should have its bases covered.
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