Audiences may still be reeling from the awesome action spectacle of The Raid 2, but the Hollywood remake machine is still focused squarely on Gareth Evan’s first entry in the franchise, the 2011 hit The Raid, released in America as The Raid: Redemption to avoid confusion with the inevitable Western retelling. Expendables 3 director Patrick Hughes has accepted the director’s chair on the remake, and Coming Soon caught up with him on the set to ask about how his version will differ from the original.
And guess what? The Raid‘s aggressively simple storyline – about a SWAT team trapped in a skyrise full of killers who want them dead – is going to change, but only to accommodate America’s post-9/11 politics and make room for the hand-to-hand action that defined the original film.
“Certainly, we’re not there to recreate that film beat for beat,“ Hughes told CraveOnline‘s sister site. “With the set up we’re following a DEA task team, which was implemented by the Bush administration after September 11th when they realized that terrorism and the drug trade were so closely aligned. So they set up a DEA task team that’s six units and they work across borders and sort of act like Navy SEALS. You never read about it, you never hear about it, but they go on these missions. So that’s a really interesting take and a really nice premise and also what’s interesting on this take on it is the clash of cultures and the clash of martial arts, the fighting styles, which is something that’s going to be a lot of fun when we’ve really started pre-vizzing stuff.”
What do you think? Is the remake already distracting from The Raid‘s simple pleasures, or do you prefer his plans to capture the idea of The Raid without simply remaking the original shot-for-shot? Let us know in the comments and head on over to Coming Soon to read the rest of Patrick Hughes’ thoughts on the original film and his upcoming remake.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
