Filmmaker Gareth Evans made a splash on the world when his 2011 action-thriller The Raid was released in theaters, redefining the action film for a new age and introducing movie fans around the world to Indonesian actors Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian who choreographed the fights in the movie. Evans followed up the movie in 2014 with The Raid 2: Berandal and upped the stakes even more, but was quick to say that a third movie in the series wouldn’t happen….whish isn’t to say that Evans never considered another film though as he revealed the entire plot for the third Raid movie in a new interview.
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Speaking on the Empire Spoiler Special Podcast (H/T Movie Web), Evans went into great detail for what he had conceived of being The Raid 3. Unfortunately for fans of the series, the movie wouldn’t have focused on Iko Uwais’ Rama and would have shifted focus to one of the supporting characters from The Raid 2. The third movie would have also overlapped with the second in its opening act and been spun out of one particular scene from the 2014 film, focusing on a Japanese kill squad sent to Jakarta to take out Boss Goto.
“You stay with the Japanese gang, who are like, ‘What the f*** do we do now? Everyone’s dead, we’ve got no-one to kill,’” Evans said about the start of the movie, which would pick up right after The Raid 2. “They get into their car, and as they’re driving along all of a sudden this other car rocks up alongside them and just blitzes them, and the cars crash. Goto, his son, and his right-hand man are the only remaining survivors from that attack, and it cuts to credits and says ‘The Raid 3.’”
“The idea was that the right-hand man, after being told to kill off all the politicians and cops and wipe the clean slate, would call back to Tokyo to the big huge boss, and be like, ‘Goto’s going f*****g nuts. This is f*****g crazy, what do I do?’ The call from HQ is, ‘Keep him still, keep him close, we’ll send people to take care of it, and if you do that for us, you can take over his turf.’ The attack goes wrong, it’s a kill squad from Japan who have turned up and taken out the Gotos. Goto has no idea that this right-hand man has betrayed him and set him up for the ambush.”
From their Evans revealed the film would stray from the series’ roots by removing itself from the city and taking off to the jungles of West Java, in what the director said would have been like the original Predator in a way. The Japanese mob boss would reunite with a former associate boss in the jungle where they’d find the city-dwelling kill squad out of their element.
“I didn’t work out the whole thing, but at some point Goto’s son would have got killed,” Evans said. “He would have realised that it was the right-hand man who betrayed him all along, and they’d have some real gnarly tribal way of dealing with him. And Goto and this guerrilla gang of Indonesian killers would then go back to Tokyo in order to f*****g take care of the people that ordered to kill him.”
Sounds like the film would have expanded the mythology of The Raid in unique ways, but perhaps not what “the fans” would have wanted. Evans acknowledged that saying “it would have pissed off an awful lot of people” and that fans knowing his plans for the film now will likely not ask him to make it.
“Before I knew it, I was five years down the line, I’d made Apostle, we were starting to get production going on Gangs Of London. I couldn’t see myself going back out to make The Raid 3. My interests had moved on to other projects,” Evans concluded. “You work with other people, you meet other people and want to work with them again, you want to try different things, you find a story that suddenly captures your attention and that’s the thing you want to do next. Things get offered to you that are hard to pass up on.”
