As a visual exercise, Wheelman is interesting: The camera never leaves the getaway car(s) being driven by Frank Grillo’s titular professional accomplice, either filming the action from the backseat or from the side of the car’s exterior. That offers a unique, rarely-seen perspective, but it’s ultimately wasted on a film that fails to deliver any actual excitement — exceptionally disappointing when it’s a film produced by Joe Carnahan, a director who knows a thing or two about crafting engaging action thrillers.
With a glut of just-okay PG-13 video game movies out there, it’s up to Uncharted to stand out and break new ground for the tricky video game adaptation — uncharted territory, if you will. Screenwriter Joe Carnahan, who recently announced he’d also helm The Raid remake and the X-Force movie, completed the Uncharted script back in January, and has said that he wrote the screenplay with the express intention of attaining an R-rating.
As the X-Universe continues to expand outward, characters deeper in the roster have gotten a chance to shine. Sure, Wolverine, Cyclops, Jean Grey and Professor X were pretty much a given from the start, but who’d have thought we’d see a cinematic appearance from Negasonic Teenage Warhead in our lifetime? A Gambit solo movie has been milling around development hell for months, the New Mutant film has been gradually amassing cast members, and today brings a major update to the progress on yet another tangential X-project, the rough-and-tumble X-Force. Today, the project gained a writer, and of course it’s a fanboy-familiar name.
Way back in 2014, Frank Grillo signed on to star in an American remake of the face-melting Indonesian action hit The Raid. The following year, the project attracted Taylor Kitsch, who — along with director Patrick Hughes and Screen Gems — subsequently dropped out, leaving the future of the remake uncertain at best. But today brings good news for fans of Grillo who’ve been hoping to see the career tough guy pummel his way through a high-rise packed with criminals — The Raid is back on, this time with an even better director.
If there’s one thing that Joe Carnahan excels at, it’s overshooting our expectations. I promise that isn’t just faint praise: Carnahan has rebooted The A-Team as a summer movie; shot a feature-length film where Liam Neeson punches wolves; released an ensemble action film about the mob trying to kill a magician. Each of these films could have been a disaster in the wrong hands, but Carnahan has consistently delivered fun and thoughtful action movies where audiences least expect it. For my money, that makes him one of the most underrated writer-directors working in the action genre today.
With Joe Carnahan (The Grey, Smokin’ Aces) recently onboard the project as a screenwriter, it looked like the Uncharted movie was off to a good start. But on Friday the film was taken off of Sony Pictures’ release calendar.
Bad Boys 3 is finally gearing up to head into production with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence returning to reprise their roles from Michael Bay’s previous films. But with filming not set to begin until early next year, the release date for the long-developing sequel has been delayed yet again, this time to 2018. On the slightly more positive side of things, the sequel has a new title, and it’s one that should earn the approval of Bad Boys fans.
Sony has been trying to get an Uncharted movie made for years now, but despite the revolving door of directing and writing talent, the studio has been unable to get the video game adaptation off the ground. When Zero Dark Thirty scribe Mark Boal was hired back in 2014, it seemed like Sony was on the right track, but it looks like they’ve gone back to the ol’ drawing board (again), tapping Bad Boys 3 director Joe Carnahan to deliver a new screenplay.