Fans of Joss Whedon’s most recently canceled series “Dollhouse,” listen up! There’s a new movie project that may interest you.
As The Hollywood Reporter noted, screenwriters Doug Cook and David Weisberg (The Rock, Double Jeopardy) sold a script to Bold Films and the plot sounds a little familiar.
Slate, described as a female-oriented take on The Bourne Identity, involves the CIA which, in order to investigate a murdered female agent, implants the agent’s memories into the damaged brain of a female convict. The agent’s lethal abilities also are implanted, and soon the convict goes rogue to discover the truth about the murder.
I remember watching the first six episodes of “Dollhouse” and I never once blinked at the idea of all the memory erasing and re-writing that they did in that show because the technology was sufficiently “shiny” enough to where I decided to believe in it. Somehow, I can’t seem to wrap my brain around the idea that this would work in a feature film featuring the CIA. Mind you, this is coming from the same person who completely bought into The Men Who Stare at Goats and Stranger Than Fiction.
I’m also looking at Bold Films’ slate and am a little confused about who they are as a production company. The first film they produced was a drama called Slingshot (2005) which starred David Arquette, Thora Birch, Balthazar Getty, and Juliana Margulies which means that from the get-go, their producers had access to a lot of the right people.
However, they also produced the third sequel to Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers which went direct-to-DVD, and managed to enlist the talents of not only the original screenwriter to write and direct this one, but they brought back Casper Van Dien to play Johnny Rico and got him Jolene Blalock (T’Pol from “Enterprise”) to be his co-star. This says to me that they’ll produce almost anything to make a buck, but at least they’ll try to make it interesting.
Most recently, they released the Paul Bettany-starring Legion in January, which has a 19% fresh rating on the Tomatometer, but made $40 million in the U.S., adequately covering its $26 million budget.
This is so confusing to me. If the producers at Bold Films have the right people in the right place, have good relationships with screenwriters, and can pick out the average money-making scripts, why is it that their movies just haven’t been that good?