Director John Woo says he plans to make a movie out of Stranglehold, the 2007 videogame that was itself a follow-up to a 1992 movie.
In 1992, John Woo directed Chow Yun-Fat, Tony Leung, Philip Kwok and a whole bunch of other completely insane dudes in Hard Boiled, otherwise known as the best damn action movie ever made. It’s hard to describe, so just watch this promo trailer and bear in mind that it’s showing mostly the slower, less violent parts. Anyway, Woo went on to do other things and despite Hard Boiled being frikkin’ awesome, there was never so much as a peep about a sequel.
Fast forward to 2007 and suddenly a sequel, sort of, made an appearance: Woo teamed with Midway to create the third-person shooter Stranglehold, with Chow Yun-Fat reprising his role as the “hard-boiled” Inspector “Tequila” Yuen. The game performed reasonably well, with Metacritic scores of 77 across all platforms, but it was hardly a major hit and not of much interest to anyone who just wanted to watch a couple hours of stuff getting blowed up real good.
Now, two years later, Woo has revealed that Stranglehold the videogame is going to be remade into Stranglehold the film. “We are going to make that into a movie,” he said in an interview with Cinematical. If the IMDB is to be believed, the movie is currently slated for a 2012 release.
Woo said that while he’d like to take another crack at making videogames, his schedule doesn’t allow it. “I don’t have that much time, even though I want to make one again,” he continued. “But for the moment, I also am producing two movies. One is shooting in Taiwan. One is shooting in Shanghai. So I am quite busy these days.”
I’ve never played Stranglehold but I have a well-used VHS copy of Hard Boiled (sent to me, somewhat ironically, by a friend from Australia) as well as an older “special edition” release on DVD. So a Stranglehold movie? That’s something I’d stand in line for.
