Two Roads Diverged, So Don't Take the Wrong F--king Path
By Brian Prisco | Posted Under Trade News | Comments (10)
When they loves ya, they loves ya hard, and now that Jeremy Renner’s getting well-deserved love for his brutal turn in The Hurt Locker, studios are hurling offers at him left and right and sideways. But like Indiana Jones facing down the old man in the cave, it’s really important that he doesn’t nuke the fridge.
Among the projects — including the intriguing rumor that Renner might be front runner for Hawkeye in The Avengers (which we’ll know this summer if he gets the cameo in Iron Man 2) — Renner’s pretty much eyeballing two major choices, according to the NY Times. The first is The Raven, a fictionalized account of the last days of Edgar Allen Poe, which will be directed by James McTeigue and co-starring Ewan McGregor. The second option is to join Peter Berg in dit-dit-dahing the aliens with the big screen adaptation of Battleship.
Obviously, I want Renner to do Battleship, because I hate him and want him to fail at life. And the bitch of the matter is, a Berg/Renner matchup could actually elevate this pic. I like Peter Berg, ever since the throat punch awesome of Very Bad Things, but he’s been having shit luck as of late with his work. But I firmly believe that Berg recognizes the absolute stupidity of this project and is raring to just go fucking bananas; it could be awesome. However, I think there’s no way he’ll get to do anything interesting and I hope Renner runs far and away into the digitized blood of McTeigue.
The Raven is truly the more intriguing of the flicks, and unlike every other critic in the free world, I fucking loved Ninja Assassin because at heart I am a 12-year-old boy. Or maybe I have the heart of a 12-year-old boy, I don’t really understand Spanish, but c’mon — it only cost forty pesos! Yet, McTeigue hasn’t proved to me that he can actually handle a decent script or bring a final project to fruition. Like everyone else who’s ever made enough purchases at Hot Topic to fill a punch card, I have an adoration for the work of Poe. Not enough that I’m gonna cut myself if this fails, but I just worry that McTeigue doesn’t actually have the atmospheric chops to make this a decent flick. Unless he’s planning to Sherlock Holmes the motherfucker and have Renner’s Poe and, what, McGregor’s Nathaniel Hawthorne become some kind of supernatural ghostfighting team that take on the House of the Seven Gables to free Heppy Pyncheon (Emily Blunt?) from the grasp of ghouls with lots of slow-motion digitized hatchets and musketfire swooshing through the air.
Either way, Renner’s got some tough decisions ahead, and I hope he chooses wisely.
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Comments
Posted by: TK at February 22, 2010 11:46 AM
pleasebeHawkeyepleasebeHawkeyepleasebeHawkeye
pleasebeHawkeyepleasebeHawkeyepleasebeHawkeyepleasebeHawkeye