THE RAID Remake to Have 12 Central Characters
The Raid remake is currently in development, and is being directed by Patrick Hughes (The Expendables 3). I saw The Expendables 3 over the weekend, and it was pretty entertaining, but I'm still not sure that Hughes has what it takes to make a movie like The Raid. In the end, the remake seems like it is going to be nothing like the original movies.
Grantland recently sat down with the director for an interview where he describes the movie as being in the vein of Black Hawk Down and Zero Dark Thirty, both of which are nothing like the original Raid movies. He says that the ensemble cast will include twelve central roles that he's currently casting, and he's looking to start shooting early next year.
“After that, I’m pretty sure I won’t do a movie with ensembles, camouflage, and guns for a while.”
As of right now, both Taylor Kitsch and Frank Grillo have been said to be up for roles in the movie. It will be interesting to see how Hughes handles twelve integral characters when telling his story because that's a lot. The director also previously revealed that the story would focus on a DEA task force saying:
"Certainly, we're not there to recreate that film beat for beat, 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."
Maybe they should retitle the movie, because it seems like it has nothing to do at all with the original.