We can’t get enough of Ben Wheatley here at SciFiNow (the only thing about the upcoming Free Fire that we’re not excited about is that it’s not genre, so we can’t cover it). So, the news that he’s circling an adaptation of Frank Miller and Geof Darrow’s berserk graphic novel Hard Boiled is pretty thrilling, as is the additional casting rumour…
Deadline reports (in a story that’s already rocking one update with the promise of more to come) that the director of High-Rise, A Field In England, Sightseers and Kill List is set to direct the movie version of Miller’s story of Nixon, an insurance investigator who discovers that he’s some kind of malfunctioning unkillable killer robot, and that Warner Bros is hoping that Tom Hiddleston will play the lead.
Hiddleston previously collaborated with Wheatley to great effect on High-Rise, playing the drifting Dr Robert Laing in the divisive JG Ballard adaptation (well, we loved it).
The site does note that, while Wheatley’s involvement is pretty much set, Hiddleston’s isn’t at this time. “We should know soon how all this works out.” So, fingers crossed. Hiddleston would be an interesting choice for the part given that Nixon looks more like a Bruce Willis in Die Hard type in the comic.
We’d also be really interested to see how it would be adapted into a film given that it’s really pretty light on story. Would there be more on the cyborg uprising? Or would we just really get a lot of the ultraviolent action that is stuffed into the panels of the comic’s second half? With Wheatley on board, it is hard to imagine that much of that would be watered down…
It’s been a couple of years since we last saw Miller’s work on the big screen, with 2014 giving us both the disappointing 300: Rise Of An Empire and the disappointing Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, but obviously his worst crime against cinema was his adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, which we can’t forget in case it happens again.
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