Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift director Justin Lin has been tapped to direct a “re-imagining” of Highlander, the cult classic tale of swords and immortals.
I hate the word “re-imagining.” You know why? Because it implies that whoever’s behind it actually has some imagination, some vision, some creative spark of his own, when that’s clearly not the case. If it was then there wouldn’t be any need for Hollywood to shamelessly plunder the graves of past films to compensate for its own shocking lack of original ideas. So you can imagine how I feel about news that Highlander, an absolutely freakin’ awesome movie that starred Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery and Clancy Brown as the most psychotically bad-ass barbarian of all time, is about to suffer that particular indignity.
Lin is rejoining with producer Neal H. Moritz to make the film, having worked with him previously on the 2009 release Fast & Furious. The new Highlander movie will be written by Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, who were part of the Iron Man writing team. Peter Davis, a producer on the original Highlander movie, will also have a production credit in the remake.
The new film will “expand on the original Highlander’s core mythology of immortals battling amongst us,” and is expected to spur the rebirth of the entire franchise. “Justin and Neal are an exciting directing/producing team and I am confident that they will deliver a truly dynamic film while being totally respectful of Highlander legend,” Davis said.
No word yet on when production is scheduled to begin or who might appear in the movie; personally, I’ve got my fingers crossed for Freddie Prinze Jr., Kane and Steven Seagal as Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez. Hell, if that happened I might actually pay to go see this thing.
Source: /Film
