Hey folks, Harry here... there isn't any real information here, Ed of Athens just wrote up such a wondrously geeky piece about the potential of a SPY HUNTER film that I just had to post it. It makes me giggle to hear his take on it all. BTW - those images may be for the upcoming new SPY HUNTER game, but they are also the designs that the film is going with. I have this on a very high authority. Here's Ed...
Hey Harry!
Back in the late 80's I played countless hours of Spy Hunter in the student center game room at U. of Georgia.
It WAS cool! One of your greatest weapons right off the bat was the ability to whipl up along side one of the opposing force vehicles (they were all dark blue), slam the wheel over and knock them off the road! That was the best 'cause it was almost tactile and produced the most satisfying crunch of metal on metal.
Of course there was more. Take the first left fork and press the flashing button in the middle of the yoke wheel to get the weapons truck. Tap the gas to pull up inside and within seconds you were ready to pour devastruction onto your foes with oil slicks that sent them spinning out of control to explode on the median. You could also add smoke screens and helicopter-killing missiles.Take the little narrow side road down to the river and make an instant conversion into the speedboat. (The oil slicks were FLAMING when delivered from the boat!) And all of this set to long riffing solos atop the Peter Gunn theme that were wild by any video game standard.
I loved that game dearly, could play for 30 minutes on one quarter... but what the heck is the PLOT of this movie going to be? The game was nothing but a car that would have made Max weep for joy (on top of everything else it never ran out of gas) and the endlessly scrolling one way road & river. The only thing that changed was it would sometimes turn wintery with a tricky ice-covered road heading through a white but otherwise identical landscape.
You know, the cool thing to do here would to make this a horror/suspense movie, a cross between Duel, Groundhog Day and the Mad Max II, where Rock would fight and fight on this endless road, never stopping, never getting a bite to eat, being worn down from the endless hours fighting faceless foes, looking less like a gleaming-smiled poster boy and more like Max at the very end of MMI, bedraggled and punch drunk behind the wheel. No matter how hard he fought, eventually one of those blue vehicles would cut him off, send him spinning out of control... and the next thing he would know there he would be again, being dumped out of the back of the first truck and with no choice but to fight on. Perhaps in the "death" sequences between his unexplained return to the driver's seat we would get some hazy, tripped out glimpses of the fates that put him in this endless chase.
But I suppose the odds of The Rock being attached to a plot so obtuse as that is nonexistent, and even then I have no idea how you would end a nightmarish film of that kind. (Maybe the camera pulls back higher and higher and you see he's in a hell of some kind? Too Twilight Zonish?) The Rock seems to like the stories where there is a goofy sidekick AND a love interest AND a kid so there are lots of opportunities for broad humor ala Scorpion King, so I would be surprised if they can make this interesting.
So there's rambling my 2 cents as a former Spy Hunter devotee.
Best Always,
Ed in Athens
So, you gamers... Any of you like SPY HUNTER? Could it be cool?
