As we talked about yesterday, Joe Carnahan is one busy dude. He’s got writing duties aligned for BAD BOYS, a remake of THE RAID (as well as directing), and possibly now the X-FORCE movie. On top of all that he’s been given reign of the scripting duties for the long-gestating UNCHARTED movie, an adaptation of the popular video game that has taken years to come together. He has a lot to live up to, but the man assures us he’ll give us something unexpected thanks to some crazy f@ckin’ action with some welcome vulgarity.
The writer/director spoke with Coming Soon recently about the upcoming project, talking about how although there are a lot of great action scenes and stories featured in the games, there’s no point in just copying them down in script form:
I probably wrote four of the biggest, f@ckin’ craziest action sequences I think I’ve ever written in that movie. I used the Uncharted games as a template but not using any one specifically, because those sequences have already been done beautifully. There’s no point in just transposing them to film, you’ve gotta come up with new shit, so that’s what I did. It was a great challenge but it was a lot of fun.
He has a way of describing his films with such profane elegance, no? As for the dialogue in the movie, though the games aren’t exactly Quentin Tarantino movies he did bring up how he won’t shy away from naughty language in the film:
When I wrote Uncharted, I didn’t spare the rod. I wrote it the way the video game is. They swear in the game, they’re kinda foul-mouthed and I kept all that stuff intact and I definitely didn’t write it as a “PG-13” movie, I wrote it the way that movie should be written.
He followed up by going into how the movies he grew up loving – DIE HARD, LETHAL WEAPON, etc. – were all R-rated, saying, “I never understood the metric for, ‘This will make X-amount more if it were PG-13.’ PG-13 in a lot of ways is a cop out, and I think it’s been exposed as such."
Though I doubt the final product will be R-rated, I like what I’m hearing. Carnahan is man who isn’t afraid to get all out, and given how crazy the games can get I think it’s that kind of spirit the movie needs. It seems like video game movies have a curse on them, but I pray he can break it here. I'm not the praying type, but for a good video game movie I'm willing to try.