Len Wiseman is one of a dozen directors who if I were Jacob in Lost, I would recruit them all up and place them on the Island for the rest of their lives- not so I could watch them redem themselves but just purely so I don't have to watch any of their movies anymore. Guys like
Brett Ratner, McG, Louis Leterrier and
Paul W.S. Anderson I would put onto that doomed Oceanic flight too. They are part of a new generation of filmmakers who usually come from a music video background, and whilst they know how to put the camera in front of a visual - they don't understand the dimensions of cinema and how to use the medium to tell a story. The problem is they simply aren't storytellers, they are t.v. level directors who got the break they didn't deserve. Wiseman is incapable of making a good movie at this point. His
Underworld films are wretched works and give the Vampire genre a bad name. His
Die Hard movie was misguided on every single level of it's execution. It's still early days in his career of course, but once you get to movie number four - you kinda know whether the kid's got it or not. Since Die Hard - Wiseman has moved onto
Gears of War, a remake of
Escape From New York - both of which failed to materialize
and it's now expected he will make a
Die Hard 5 - all loud blockbusters, all films where he can utilize his action toys but you feel like he is just moving from project-to-project, without the heart or the passion to actually tell a story he wants to tell. He never pitched any of these projects. He is a director-for-hire, and he has shamelessly attached himself to whatever he can. It's something Ratner has made an art of.
THR reported yesterday that Wiseman had begun talks with Columbia to contemporary re-imagine
Total Recall - the well remembered
Paul Verhoeven crazy science fiction B-movie from two decades ago.
Kurt Wimmer's (Equilibrium, Law Abiding Citizen) screenplay has been floating around at the studio for a while, based of course on Philip K. Dick's "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale".
It followed a man haunted by a recurring dream of journeying to Mars who buys a literal dream vacation from a company called Rekall Inc., which sells implanted memories. The man comes to believe he is a secret agent and ends up on a Martian colony, where he fights to overthrow a despotic ruler controlling the production of air.
Verhoeven's movie isn't perfect by any means, but the tale he told with
Arnold Schwarznegger and
Sharon Stone was completely his. It was his vision for what a Phillip K. Dick adaptation should look like, a true author telling a story with the camera. Can we really expect Wiseman to do the same? Last I heard Die Hard 5 was shooting next year, so it might be a while before this one is a go-er.
Note: Irony of all ironies. The project is setup at Neil H. Mortiz's production shingle Original Films. Riiiiiiiiiiight.