Oscar-nominee and Hollywood hardmanTom Hardyhas finally wreaked havoc onNetflix. Now that you’ve seen Hardy dispense brutal justice at last, you need to check out this unforgivably underrated martial arts action movie from the same director,The Raid’sGareth Evans, and led by another genre icon. And if that were not already enough to get you excited, it’s streaming free.
Released back in 2009,Merantau(AKAMerantau Warrior), was written, directed and edited by Gareth Evans, and marks his first collaboration with, and the first role for,The Raid’sIko Uwais. Starring Sisca Jessica, Mads Koudal, Laurent Buson, Yusuf Aulia, Alex Abbad, Christine Hakim, Donny Alamsyah, andThe RaidandThe Raid 2star Yayan Ruhian alongside Uwais,Merantauis a must-see for any action fan, and particularly those eager for more of the expertly crafted fight sequences that Evansand Uwais can achieve.
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It’s ‘The Raid’ on a plane.
Merantauis now available to stream, rent, and purchase on several platforms, including Apple TV and Prime Video, and is streaming for free with ads on the likes ofThe Roku Channeland Pluto TV. If you are currently making the mistake of still reading this and not rushing to stream the Pencak silat delights ofMerantau, then you can check out the movie’s plot below.
InMerantau, Iko Uwais takes the lead as Yuda, a skilled martial arts practitioner who is in the final preparations to begin his “Merantau” a century’s old rites-of-passage to be carried out by the community’s young men that will see him leave the comforts of his idyllic farming village and make a name for himself in the bustling city of Jakarta. Of course, when he arrives, he finds that he will rely on his skills far more than he ever expected.
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While Hollywood has sadly struggled to find a place for Iko Uwais (who has now started his own production company), director Gareth Evans recently unleashed the Netflix action thrillerHavoc. Starring Tom Hardy as a bruised detective who is sent into the criminal underworld to find a politician’s missing son,Havochas been a huge successfor the streamer, despite some mixed reviews.
Uwais, meanwhile, followed upMerantauwith lead roles inThe RaidandThe Raid 2, both of which are now consideredmodern action movie masterpieces. While it was thought thatThe Raid 3would never happen, Evans did recently reveal that, after a meeting with Uwais, he is nowseriously considering coming back for more.
“I’ll see when it can happen, if it can happen, is my really sort of non-committal answer to that question. Initially, I had a concept that would’ve followed immediately after the back of The Raid 2. It was set literally minutes after the second one finished, but then I got busy with other projects, and then, before I even had time to think about it, so many years had passed that I couldn’t do that version of that film anymore.
So I kind of just left it and cast it aside and thought, ‘Okay, well, I was happy with where we finished in The Raid 2, so I’m probably not going to do another version, not do a third part. So I just dismissed it outright.”
