Vin Diesel to be John Singleton's Wheelman
Four Brothers and Boyz n the Hood director John Singleton is set to return to the silver screen with Vin Diesel behind the wheel. Variety is reporting that the two are signed up to make "Wheelman," a film adaptation of a video game released this past March. Lorezno di Bonaventura is going to produce the live-action feature with Diesel and Samantha Vincent.
Diesel will be playing Milo Burik, an "expert driver" who leaves retirement to protect "a woman from his past." The Fast and Furious actor also helped produce the video game, whose main character was even modeled after his image.
A script for the project was originally written by Rich Wilkes (who wrote the original xXx). A re-write was done by Oliver Butcher and Stephen Cornwell, the writing duo who scripted The Gamekeeper - Guy Ritchie's next film after Sherlock Holmes.
The math for this project is kind of obvious. News of another movie where Vin Diesel drives at awesome speeds (escaping big explosions, I hope!!!) comes a bit Fast and Furious after the success of that particular racing film's success. But the math also works. Diesel fueled car bonanzas sell, and so far they've been pretty damn fun. But video-game movies get a heavy stigma, and the number of decent movies based on video games could be counted better by my dog (yeah, I said it). Thus, the question of quality is at hand, but at the least, the amount of explosions is not. Hell yeah!
Source: Variety