While adaptations, sequels, reboots, and remakes continue on in their mission to suffocate the American movie goer, we’ve experienced a significant slow down of video game flicks hitting theaters. Not that we’re missing out on revelatory films or anything; many consider it a godsend that Hollywood hasn’t bitch slapped gamers with another stinker n’ sinker like Tomb Raider.
But from the ashes of adaptations that just couldn’t take flight comes news that New Line Cinemas (the studio that brought you classics like Dumb and Dumber and those lesser known Hobbit movies) is fronting the bill for a Rampage feature length. If you haven’t played any of Midway Games’ numerous Rampage incarnations that span across a battalion of systems – my favorite being Rampage: World Tour and its sequels for the N64/PS1 era – then shame on your soul.
Rampage is the quaint story of everyday citizens becoming genetically altered, gigantic assholes (literally gigantic) that react to their changing bodies in the only way a person can: teaming up and body slamming the shit out of skyscrapers while devouring everything in sight, living or not, as if they were gamma radiated Hulk Hogans run afoul.
New Line hopes to profit on this concept by creating a “smartly budgeted monster movie in the vein of Ghostbusters and Independence Day." I’d call adaptations like the Angry Birds movie a cash grab; adapting Rampage sounds like it could be a stroke of insane genius if the right dosage of humor, wit, and eating people are concocted together.