Gareth Evans put himself on the map with his highly-stylized, brutally violent martial arts movie The Raid: Redemption and its sequel The Raid 2. Even if that genre isn’t your cup of tea, it’s hard to deny the fact that both movies featured stunning set pieces of non-stop bone-cracking, blood-squirting fight and action scenes ‐ some of the most entertaining and bloody in recent memory.
If that is your cup of tea, you should check out Evans’s YouTube where he recently dropped a five-minute short film he directed featuring samurai warriors engaging in a well-choreographed fight scene in the same style as his The Raid movies. However, there is a catch: there’s no bloody, R-rated violence. In fact, the scene is especially tame in comparison.
Evans and team made this short to see if it was even possible to replicate the style of the Raid movies without all the brutality and to stay within the parameters of a PG-13 rating. Per his Twitter:
“Had the pleasure of having Yayan Ruhian, Cecep Arif Rahman and Hannah Al Rashid visit me in Wales over the summer holidays for a week or so. While here, we made the following little short sequence; partly to test out some choreography ideas I had, partly to see if we could create something non-violent my kiddo could see, but mainly [because] I really needed to fucking shoot something after 2 years without picking up a camera.”
Posted in the description, the storyline is as follows: In a time of civil war, a young warrior is given the task of delivering a treaty between two rival lords. During her journey through the woods however, she finds herself hunted by two assassins intent on intercepting her message of peace in a bid to maintain the fear, instability and violent rule of their leader.
The title of the video is Pre Vis Action, named because it’s essentially a pre-visualization of a fight scene likely dancing around in Evans’s head, possibly connected to a larger feature in the conceptual stages and intended to adhere to the parameters of PG-13. Sure, all that bloody, wince-inducing violence from the Raid 1 and 2 was pretty damn awesome but the style of those fight scenes is replicated enough here in this short that even a tame martial arts movie from Evans could be just as memorable and entertaining.
