Someone’s gotta figure it out eventually, right?
That’s probably what 20th Century Fox is thinking right about now in regards to their latest project, as the studio has just announced an adaptation of Square Enix’s video game, Just Cause. Despite the fact that both Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed (which also came from Fox) bombed last year, they aren’t giving up on cracking the code for how to make a good video game movie, and we sincerely hope that they’ve learned from their mistakes.
This time around, they’ve drafted in Justice League and Aquaman star Jason Momoa to lead while Brad Peyton, of San Andreas fame, will get behind the camera, working off a script from John Collee (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World). While the majority of the plot is under wraps, we do know that the film will loosely adapt the source material, as it’ll follow “Rico Rodriguez (Momoa), an operative for an organization known as the Agency” who has a “crisis of conscience while on a mission.”
Admittedly, the Just Cause video games are a lot of fun, giving you an open world to run around in and cause enormous amounts of destruction while also providing you with a number of very fun toys to use to complete your mission. That being said, the premise of the series is hardly begging to be turned into a film, as there’s not a whole lot of story or character development here. Most likely, this adaptation will be another big, loud, dumb action movie engineered for mass appeal during the summer blockbuster season.
While both Momoa and Peyton are very well suited to that type of outing, we can’t see Just Cause doing much to break the curse of video game films. It may make the studio a bit of money and provide audiences with some mindless entertainment for a few hours on a hot summer afternoon, but we wouldn’t walk into this one expecting very much.