“The Raid” Japanese Theatrical Poster
Back in March of 2014, director Gareth Evans (The Raid 2) told Crave: “I don’t have any plans to do The Raid 3 within the next two or three years so I’m going to take a break from that franchise for a bit… I want to do some some things outside of Indonesia for like two films, then come back to Indonesia and shoot The Raid 3. I have another one I want to shoot with him first. Still in the action genre and it’s something that [Uwais] needs to train for for a fair amount of time.”
There’s a possibility that Evans is talking about Blister, a film with Raid 2 stars Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian, that’s apparently in pre-production phase, as hinted by his latest tweet.
Evans describes Blister as his take on “the contemporary American gangster story with echoes of The Wild Bunch.” This remark should come as no surprise, since Evans expressed his love for the Sam Peckinpah classic in our interview with him back in December of 2013: “Peckinpah invented action cinema, the editing style, cinematography, fluidity – everything I’ve stolen has been from him,” said Evans. Along with Wild Bunch, Evans cites Jackie Chan’s Armor of God and John Woo’s Hard Boiled as the three movies that have have influenced him the most.
Updates: In a November (2016) interview with Impact’s Mike Leeder, here’s what Evans said about this project: Blister is very much something I want to revisit – sometimes you need certain elements to line up just right – especially for a project as ambitious as that one and unfortunately (despite the best intentions of everyone involved) it didn’t quite come through. We prepped that film pretty thoroughly so I do hope, further down the line, it will become a reality. We had far too much killer material for it to end up sitting on a shelf.
