Joe Carnahan gives a few updates on his remake of The Raid

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

THE RAID and it's sequel are two of my favourite action films of all-time, and while the chances of a third installment seem quite unlikely at this point, there has been an English-language remake in the works for a number of years. The remake is slated to be directed by Joe Carnahan (THE GREY) with Frank Grillo (THE PURGE: ELECTION YEAR) taking the lead, and Carnahan recently spoke with Collider to reveal a few details about the film, including setting up the opening.

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.

Joe Carnahan is optimistic that pre-production on THE RAID will get underway in the next couple of weeks, so I guess we'll likely hear something more in the near future in regards to whether the film will actually happen. In terms of the action, Joe Carnahan certainly isn't someone whose going to skip out on the more brutal bits, telling Collider that he wants to bring an intense level of emotion to every action sequence. "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," Carnahan said. "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." I'm typically not down with these sorts of remakes, but Joe Carnahan and Frank Grillo are exactly the types of guys who can do it right. Fingers crossed.

The director's next project is EL CHICANO, which Carnahan produced and co-wrote along with director Ben Bray. The film follows an LAPD Detective who must take on the mantle of El Chicano to wage a bloody war against the gangs threatening his city. EL CHICANO is set for a May 3, 2019 release.