The Japanese action movie Re:Born is likely the closest thing the world will ever see to The Raid 3. Gareth Evans's 2012 action movie The Raid: Redemption became an all-time action classic, the film following a team of Jakarta police officers who engage in a harrowing raid of an apartment complex populated by criminals and killers. Evans's 2014 follow-up The Raid 2 would earn just as much adulation, but despite initially planning the series as a trilogy, Evans ultimately decided not to move ahead with The Raid 3 after returning to his native Wales from Indonesia.
With The Raid movies setting a new standard for martial arts films, the 2016 assassin action movie Re:Born would rise to that standard. Re:Born focuses on retired special forces soldier Toshiro Kuroda (Tak Sakaguchi) protecting a young girl from his old enemies, and despite not being directly connected to The Raid films, Re:Born has a curious amount in common with them. What's more, with The Raid 3 not having been realized, Re:Born is the next best thing.
Re: Born Feels A Lot Like The Raid Movies
The Raid is an action-horror combo at its finest, placing Rama (Iko Uwais), Jaka (Joe Taslim), and their fellow officers in a terrifying scenario that forces them to fight for their lives. The Raid 2 would transition into more of a crime movie of warring gangs in Jakarta. Re:Born oddly matches the tone of both, portraying Toshiro as a feared, legendary assassin known as "The Ghost", frequently battling his enemies in shadowy corridors and fending off surprise attacks (in addition to sharing The Raid's video game-like structure, Re:Born is also essentially Japan's answer to John Wick.)
While less overtly steeped in the organized crime element of The Raid 2, Re:Born nevertheless matches the escalation of its predecessor's action. Like Rama in The Raid 2, Toshiro faces literally hundreds of opponents in Re:Born, even wielding a modified version of the Indonesian blade known as the kerambit as his weapon of choice. The kerambit is put to use it The Raid 2's quite bloody kitchen showdown between Rama and Cecep Arif Rahman's assassin, with Re:Born's own use of the weapon giving its action scenes a feeling reminiscent of The Raid 2. Meanwhile, the finale of Re:Born is where it really becomes a surprising stand-in for The Raid 3.
Re: Born Has Parallels With The Raid 3's Story
Per Garth Evans, his planned story for The Raid 3 only featured Rama in a minor role, and focused on a gang war initiated by the Goto family against other Yakuza factions. This was intended to unfold in the jungles outside of Jakarta, and Re:Born's third act is not far off from that concept. With two assassin allies, Toshiro battles dozens of camouflaged assassins in a forest, single-handedly eliminating all of them, before the final showdown in a factory. Re:Born's astonishing forest battle not only takes up a good chunk of the movie, but also embodies a kind of cliff notes presentation of what The Raid 3 was intended to be.
While Re:Born certainly has its own distinct style of action, it nonetheless has enough in common with the Iko Uwais-led martial arts movies to be looked at almost as a spiritual sequel to The Raid films. Ultimately, The Raid 3 never progressed due to Gareth Evans feeling satisfied with how The Raid 2 concluded the story of the series. However, in lieu of The Raid 3, Re:Born is an extremely worthy substitute.
