There’s been a bit of a lull in American companies trying to remake every movie coming out of Asia, but Screen Gems obviously sees potential in the Indonesia action-thriller The Raid, as THR reports that they’re currently in talks for a remake of the film, which won the Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness audience award.
Rather unusually, despite being an Indonesian movie, the original director is Welsh. Gareth Evans has always had a fascination with Asia, as even his first student film at Cardiff Uni was in Japanese and about Samurais, and two of the three movies he’s made – The Raid and Merantau – are Indonesian. Evans was offered to direct the remake, but he declined the offer, preferring to stay in Asia and make a sequel to The Raid, which he hopes to shoot in February (and there aren’t many directors who’d turn down an overture from Hollywood because of their fascination with another part of the world).
The Raid is about a SWAT team that becomes trapped in a tenement run by a ruthless mobster, who is armed with two highly violent martial arts killers and an army of machete-swinging, machine gun-toting dealers and thugs. Screen Gems apparently sees the film’s unique fighting style, dubbes ‘silat’, as an important part of the film, but it could prove quite a challenge to duplicate it for the remake, especially without Evans onboard.
Hopefully though we should get to see the original Indonesian original soon, as Sony Pictures recently picked up the worldwide rights.