Is Peter Berg Hollywood’s most virile director? Everything he does is so manly and muscular (“The Kingdom,” “”Friday Night Lights”). And he’s such a sporto jock (“Friday Night Lights,” plus a documentary he’s bringing to TIFF ’09 about Canadian hockey legend Wayne Gretzky called, “Kings Ransom“; evidently an hour-long version of a 30 minute version he did for ESPN; probably part of this “30 For 30″ program that includes sports docs by directors such as Spike Lee, Barry Levinson, Albert Maysles, Richard Linklater, Barbara Kopple, etc.).
Berg , who loves to shoot movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars like they’re episodes of “The Shield,” — has other potential masculine adaptations in the works — “Dune,” “Hercules,” “Battleship,” etc. — and all of them sound like anything but pensive meditations and are more balls-to-the-wall action heave-ho flicks. So what of the semi-anomaly, “Hancock”? A goofy super hero film with a relatively hyper violent ending just to prove to the PG-13 crowd he can shake you up when you least expect it?
Berg has been threatening to tackle a “Hancock 2” film pretty much ever since the original was finished and now the red-blooded filmmaker says Charlize Theron and Will Smith will both return for the sequel. “Everybody’s going to come back for a sequel,” he told MTV, noting he has a new super villain in the works. “We have [someone in mind]. I’m not gonna tell you who, but we have!”
This is probably the part of the article where we say we loathed “Hancock,” and Berg should tackle anything else first. At the end of the first film [SPOILER] it was revealed that Smith’s character wasn’t a lousy drunk superhero but actually a genuinely heroic god. And so was Charlize Theron, for some reason.
Addendum: This is part of the post where we say, $100 bucks we don’t see this project for years if at all and all or most of the aforementioned other projects hit first. Then again, fraaaaannncchhiiiisssseeee…
