Pierre Morel (best known to those who still insist on calling them “freedom fries” as the director of Taken) is slated to helm an action/espionage thriller set in Tokyo.
Variety sums up the plot of said unnamed flick thusly: “Story follows a CIA operative, stationed in Japan but on the verge of retirement, who is ordered to carry out a final mission. He finds himself caught in the middle of an international conspiracy.”
The takeaway message here — and in Taken — is that CIA agents never really retire. They’re just put on ice for awhile until it’s time to crack some muthafuckin’ heads.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t see how this can be anything but good news. For starters, anything associated with Japan is instantly awesome (see: Hello Kitty, Audition and the Datsun B210 (yes, the B stands for Badass).
Second, the fight scenes and overall pace of Taken were pants-shittingly great. Morel pushed the violence into hard PG-13 territory with aplomb, always suggesting more gore than we actually saw. That’s the mark of a great visual storyteller. He knows how to milk what’s not shown to thrill the audience.
If there’s any quibble for me about Morel’s style, it’s this: The brother needs to figure out how to present car chases. A good car chase (and this goes for you too, Marc Fucking Forster) does not consist of a spastic assemblage of shaky close-ups. When there’s a car chase on, I like to actually see who’s driving what and what the fuck’s going on.
I think both Morel and Forster could stand a good talking-to from the likes of Michael Bay, Justin Lin and Zombie John Frankenheimer.
But like I said, that’s just a quibble. Don’t mind me when I start a-quibblin’. Quibble. Quibble. Quibble. *BELCH* Quibble.