Perhaps the best action film of the century has been director Gareth Evans’ The Raid: Redemption. An unceasingly propulsive film that chronicles what happens when a group of police SWAT team raid a slum housing project to capture a drug lord only to find themselves caught in a trap that they have to fight their way out of. It created a sensation when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011 that Screen Gems snapped up the English-language remake rights to the Indonesian film.
A new report from The Tracking Board is stating that the remake is in trouble as attached director Patrick Hughes (The Expendables 3), star Taylor Kitsch and Screen Gems have all abandoned the project. There was no reasons given for the defections, but Hughes is prepping The Storm Warning, the story of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race disaster. The Tracking Board notes that since Hughes is Australian, this project might have a stronger pull on his priorities than The Raid remake. There is no word as to why Kitsch and Screen Gems have walked off the project.
All that is left now is XYZ Films, the production company that had a hand in the original film. Evans is also attached as an executive producer for the remake, though how much actual involvement he may have is up in the air. XYZ is reportedly looking for another director to step in for Hughes.
While I am not necessarily adverse to the idea of remakes, I really have never seen a driving need to remake The Raid: Redemption. The original film does everything it sets out to do so perfectly that there doesn’t seem to be a concrete reason to try and tell the same story again. If Screen Gems is worried that the original is in a foreign language, the film has already been released on home video with an optional English-language dub that doesn’t seem to have hampered its sales in any way. Besides, if I may be a bit snarky, haven’t we already seen a remake of The Raid in the Judge Dredd comic book adaptation Dredd?
While we wait to see if anything ever happens with the proposed remake, here’s the original’s trailer.
