The American remake of Gareth Evans’ critically acclaimed action film “The Raid” was first announced back in 2011, but it hasn’t made any real progress since then.
The original film follows a team of elite cops raiding an apartment building controlled by a crime lord. One of the cops (Iko Uwais) has a personal connection – his brother Donny is a member of the crime lord’s gang.
The likes of Taylor Kitsch and Chris and Liam Hemsworth were attached at one point to star, but at last report from back in 2017 was the word that Joe Carnahan was going to direct the project.
This past week, Collider spoke with Carnahan who revealed that the work he did on the film is being utilised in another way. Carnahan says that he’s no longer working with rights holders XYZ Films, instead he’s taking the script he wrote for “The Raid” remake and using it to make a completely new movie titled “Zeno”:
“The version that I wrote, [the police] don’t ever intend to actually go in [to the crime lord’s building]. They think that they’re gonna move this guy. So their whole operation is, ‘we’re gonna hit this guy in transit.’ It’s not until they realize, ‘Oh, they’re digging in, they’re not moving, we’ve got to now go in and get him.’ It’s a very, very different script…It’s really, really, really about the brothers.”
Carnahan adds that negotiations are underway with a ‘major star’ to play the lead, and another actor is already signed on to play the villain (but won’t reveal who). Carnahan will shoot the film once he wraps work on the Mel Gibson and Frank Grillo-led “Leo from Toledo”.
In that film, Gibson plays a man suffering from ‘waking dementia’ who goes by the name Leo Ward. After an assault with tough guys, he wakes in a hospital to find he’s been submitted under his real name – he was a Kansas City mob hitman who went into witness protection. Now they know he’s alive and they are coming for him.
A one-month shoot will take place on that around the start of April. Carnahan’s action thriller “Boss Level” was screen the other day to very strong early reaction online (but no reviews as yet).
