Joe Carnahan has given action movie fans a taste of what to expect from his long-awaited remake of ‘The Raid’.

A Hollywood remake of Gareth Evans’ 2011 Indonesian action thriller has been in development for several years with Frank Grillo attached to star.

Joe Carnahan has now broken his silence on the subject to reveal that The Raid remake is finally happening and may be happening sooner than people think.

Speaking in an interview with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, the Narc and Smokin’ Aces filmmaker outlined his plans for the film and how it will differ from the original.

How will The Raid remake differ to the original?

This version of The Raid will start with our central protagonist (Grillo) already in a whole heap of trouble.

Carnahan said:

“You meet Frank’s character having just rotated back from a really, really, brutal special forces operation. He’s got soft tissue damage in his hands, and his rotator cuff is blown out, and they take fluid off his knees, and the doctors basically tell him, ‘Listen you’re at the razor’s edge of PTSD and you need three months of just nothing, some R&R, because you’re jacked up.’

“And in that space he gets the message that his brother, who he thought had been dead for four years, is actually alive and working for a very bad guy in Caracas, and in 18 hours they’re gonna kill his brother. These forces are gonna descend and murder the bad guy and murder the brother, so do you wanna go and get your brother, who you thought is dead? Do you want that opportunity? So that’s where we start.”

How will The Raid remake improve on the original?

Carnahan knows he can’t improve on the incredible fight choreography of the original, preferring to take a more intense, emotionally-led approach.

Carnahan said:

“I want the entire movie to feel like the knife fight between Adam Goldberg and the German in Saving Private Ryan. Everything. In every great action film there’s always an emotional quotient that you’re dealing with… You have to have a sense of stakes.

“For all of the tremendous excess of those last two Matrix films, which I enjoyed the hell out of, they never really got to the tension of just Keanu Reeves trying to answer a phone at the end of the first movie. There was great pathos, there was a great sense of, ‘Is he gonna make it?’ The spectacle I think outweighs the heart and soul of it, and that’s what you have to remember is you’ve gotta have that attached.”

When will The Raid remake be released?

There’s no release date set for The Raid remake but Carnahan has started preparation work on the film, which could arrive at some point in 2020.



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