By Ben Travis | Posted 23 Apr 2020

Few action movies have had as seismic an impact on audiences (and the industry) as The Raid and The Raid 2. With his pair of brutal Indonesian martial arts classics, Welsh director Gareth Evans pushed the boundaries of stunt work, fight choreography, and action photograpy, raising the bar with wince-worthy beatdowns, and making an international star of lead actor Iko Uwais. But while Uwais’ Rama was the focal point of both Raid movies, the director reveals that the character wouldn’t have led the mooted (and mostly likely now abandoned) third entry in the series.

Speaking on a new Empire Spoiler Special Podcast – with Evans offering a retro look back at the original 2011 The Raid – the filmmaker opened up about why Rama wouldn’t have led The Raid 3. “I couldn't fathom of another fucking reason why he would put his life at risk and separate himself from his fucking wife and kid again,” he admits. “I was like, it can't be about Rama. It just can't, because if he does something to pull himself away from his poor fucking wife and kid again, I'd be like, ‘Hmm, you sort of deserve to die now really. Take some responsibility and be a father for a change!’” As it turns out, Rama’s final line at the end of The Raid 2, ‘I’m done’, proved prophetic. “It’s a very convenient last line of dialogue to have,” Evans laughs.

With The Raid 2 significantly opening up the world of the series, a sprawling crime epic bringing in rival warring gangs, Evans’ plans for The Raid 3 would have delved into another corner of the Asian criminal underworld. “The story was going to go back in time to the moment in The Raid 2 when the Goto Gang, the Japanese gang, are having a meeting, and Goto tells his right-hand man to take care of it, wipe out every corrupt cop and politician that they have on the books and start fresh,” says Evans. “The Raid 3 would begin with Rama coming out of that building after having killed everybody and saying 'No, I'm done'. He walks away to [police officer] Bunawar, who'll be waiting for him in his car, he gets in and drives away. And you stay with the Japanese gang, who are like, 'What the fuck do we do now? Everyone's dead, we've got no-one to kill.' They get into their car, and as they're driving along all of a sudden this other car rocks up alongside them and just blitzes them, and the cars crash. Goto, his son, and his right-hand man are the only remaining survivors from that attack, and it cuts to credits and says 'The Raid 3'.

“Then it would jump back in time. The idea was that the right-hand man, after being told to kill off all the politicians and cops and wipe the clean slate, would call back to Tokyo to the big huge boss, and be like, 'Goto's going fucking nuts. This is fucking crazy, what do I do?' The call from HQ is, 'Keep him still, keep him close, we'll send people to take care of it, and if you do that for us, you can take over his turf.' The attack goes wrong – it's a kill squad from Japan who have turned up and taken out the Gotos. Goto has no idea that this right-hand man has betrayed him and set him up for the ambush.”

With the action then set to follow Goto after the Yakuza attack, Evans would have taken the story into an all-new location: the Indonesian jungle. “They go off into hiding, all the way to the jungles of West Java,” the filmmaker explains. “Goto arranges to meet up with this old mafia boss (played by) Christine Hakim, who has trained killers in her jungle retreat. She's providing protection for Goto because they go way back, she's the one who introduced him to Jakarta in the first place. The idea is this Japanese kill squad that’s used to the streets of Tokyo suddenly have to deal with the terrain of a jungle-hunt, a bit like Predator in a way. Christine's militia, these guerrilla kids, would be taking care of this Japanese intrusion on their land. I didn't work out the whole thing, but at some point Goto's son would have got killed, he would have realised that it was the right-hand man who betrayed him all along, and they’d have some real gnarly tribal way of dealing with him. And Goto and this guerrilla gang of Indonesian killers would then go back to Tokyo in order to fucking take care of the people that ordered to kill him.”

It was, then, going to be a very different kind of Raid film, slimming back The Raid 2’s epic sensibilities for a short, sharp 95-minute runtime. “I definitely think it would have pissed off an awful lot of people,” Evans laughs, “so maybe now they know what I had planned, people will be like, 'You know what, don't worry about The Raid 3, we're good!'” As for why it never happened, after Evans spent 18 months working on post-The Raid 2 movie Blister, a project didn’t come together, he felt he’d moved on from his earlier works. “Before I knew it, I was five years down the line, I'd made Apostle, we were starting to get production going on Gangs Of London,” he explains. “I couldn't see myself going back out to make The Raid 3. My interests had moved on to other projects. You work with other people, you meet other people and want to work with them again, you want to try different things, you find a story that suddenly captures your attention and that's the thing you want to do next. Things get offered to you that are hard to pass up on.” At least we’ll always have The Raid and The Raid 2 – and his very detailed rundown of The Raid 3.

Listen to Empire’s full Gareth Evans interview on the all-new retro The Raid episode of the Empire Spoiler Special Podcast – and catch Evans’ new action-packed crime series Gangs Of London on Sky Atlantic now.