The Raid remake to feel like Saving Private Ryan; prep starts this year

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

It looks like director Joe Carnahan's remake of THE RAID starring Frank Grillo might not be as dead as we all thought. In fact, Carnahan recently revealed that he’ll hopefully be starting prep on his version of director Gareth Evans’ 2011 Indonesian action thriller in the next few weeks. On top of that, Carnahan described the opening of the film, with Grillo’s character already in rough shape before the titular raid, saying:

You meet [Frank Grillo'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.

He continues:

I want the entire movie to feel like the knife fight between Adam Goldberg and the German in Saving Private Ryan. Everything.

And finally:

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.

The original film followed:

A rookie member of an elite team of commandos, Rama (Iko Uwais) is instructed to hang back while his comrades-in-arms go ahead with their mission to take down a brutal crime lord called Tama (Ray Sahetapy). However, the team's cover is blown, and Tama offers sanctuary to every criminal in his high-rise apartment block in exchange for the cops' heads. Now Rama must take command and lead his remaining team on an ultraviolent charge through the building to complete — and survive — the mission.

The original film was written and directed by Gareth Evans Ario Sagantoro produced and the film starred Iko Uwais, Joe Taslim, Donny Alamsyah, Yayan Ruhian, Pierre Gruno, Ray Sahetapy, and Tegar Sathya. If you don't already own the flick, you can buy it on Blu-ray RIGHT HERE.