Finland's masked vigilante returns in an English-language sequel that took years to finally reach screens.
The Short Answer
Rendel 2: Cycle of Revenge did get made. It was announced at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, filming was planned for September 2019, and one database lists a DVD release on 28 June 2024. Raven Banner Entertainment, the sales company involved, also placed the film on its 2024 European Film Market slate under the title Rendel: Cycle of Revenge. The long gap between announcement and release is the reason fans started asking what had happened to it.
Where It Started
Rendel, the original film, was released in Finland on 22 September 2017. Jesse Haaja directed and produced it, and he created the title character. The writers were Haaja, Pekka Lehtosaari, Timo Puustinen and Miika J. Norvanto. Kris Gummerus plays Rämö, the financial director of a company called VALA, which is a front for a criminal organisation and sells a vaccine that was never properly tested.
When Rämö discovers the deaths it has caused, his wife and daughter are killed and he is left for dead. He covers his face with the tar-like vaccine substance and becomes the vigilante Rendel. The film ends with the higher-ups vowing revenge.
The Original's Unusual Production
The budget was 1.45 million euros, and filming took 50 days across autumn 2015 and spring 2016 in Kajaani, Mikkeli, Varkaus, Helsinki, Sotkamo, Kuopio and Puolanka. Haaja secured nearly 500 sponsors, and the towns of Mikkeli and Varkaus were among the financiers. The band The Rasmus performed the song Wonderman. Shout Factory released the film on DVD and Blu-ray on 30 January 2018, and it won Best Action Movie at the Feratum Film Festival in Mexico.
That story of a community-funded action movie is part of the reason the sequel mattered to fans. A film financed by hundreds of sponsors is not easily abandoned, and the interest in a follow-up was genuine.
The Sequel Announcement
The sequel was announced at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival by Raven Banner Entertainment, working with Haaja and Black Lion Pictures. Filming was announced for September 2019 and was to be shot entirely in English. Gummerus was to return as Rendel, Jessica Wolff was announced as replacing Alina Tomnikov as Marla, and Sean Cronin was cast as the villain Smiley. Reports say the film was shot in Kainuu in 2019.
The Finished Film
Filmstarts lists Rendel 2: Cycle of Revenge as a Jesse Haaja film with a screenplay by Pekka Lehtosaari and a running time of one hour and 39 minutes. The cast includes Kristofer Gummerus as Rendel, also known as Rämö, Sean Cronin as Smiley, Bruce Payne as Edward Cox and Tero Salenius as Kurikka. Smiley is Christopher Smiley Cox, a man who works for VALA.
The plot picks up the same thread. After a crime kills his family, Rämö becomes a masked vigilante who targets VALA and its backers, who released untested vaccines that proved deadly. He is the sole survivor of an attack meant to silence him, and he is a former VALA employee who had planned to expose the company.
Why the Delay
The sources disagree on some dates, which is part of the mystery. Reports say filming happened in 2019, while Filmstarts gives the production year as 2022 and a DVD date in June 2024. A gap like that is common for independent films with international sales. Post-production, financing, festival strategy and distribution deals can each add months, and a global event such as the pandemic, which hit film production in 2020, did not help. The film's appearance on a 2024 market slate suggests that its sales campaign was still active years after its announcement.
English and the International Market
One striking decision was to shoot the sequel entirely in English. The first film was a Finnish production set largely in Mikkeli, and its dialogue was Finnish. Moving to English opened the sequel to the sales markets where Raven Banner works, and the addition of Bruce Payne, a veteran of English-language genre films, to the cast fits that strategy. It also changes the film's identity, since part of the original's charm was its local flavor.
The Character
Rendel's appeal rests on a simple image: a man whose face is covered in a black substance made from the poison that killed his family. It is a comic-book origin story with a pharmaceutical twist, and the title Cycle of Revenge suggests that the sequel is about the consequences of vengeance rather than just more of it.
Verdict
Whatever happened to Rendel 2? It was made, it was sold and it reached disc, even if slowly. Fans of the original can find it under both Rendel 2: Cycle of Revenge and Rendel: Cycle of Revenge. As ever with independent action cinema, the real story is persistence: a filmmaker with a loyal base of sponsors and a distributor willing to keep selling a title for years. Whether the finished film lives up to the first is for each viewer to decide, but its existence is already a small victory for the Finnish genre scene.
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