Hollywood Turns to Board Games for Ideas

Liam Neeson Boards 'Battleship' Movie

I know this kid must be thinking "Why is Dad wearing a gay white sweater-vest?"

Hollywood finds yet another way to completely baffle me. Today the wonderful folks on Tinseltown have apparently signed Mr. Ra's Al Ghoul himself, Liam Neeson, to star in the upcoming film adaptation of the popular boardgame "Battleship." No jokes are necessary here...the first sentence is funny enough. Hollywood has gone to the far reaches of unoriginality to create a serious movie based on a board game, and I never imagined I would see something like this happen. I don't know why this is necessary considering the hundreds of other creative properties they could adapt and ruin, but then again, Hollywood continues to force feed audiences the films we don't need.

Neeson better learn to mind his surroundings, Battleship will bomb

Before I begin ranting as to why this is evidently a dumb idea, let me first bash the casting and plot of the film. According to Entertainment Weekly.com, the film is an action-adventure about the planet battling a colossal force. So now that we have THAT all cleared up, here's my battleship themed guess as to what that force may be...B-7 that it's global warming....HIT!!!  Regardless of what this "colossal force" will be, whether it be a nuclear threat, global warming, terrorists, etc. the film's apparent direction in its casting is ridiculous. Liam Neeson is set to play Admiral Shane, with Taylor Kitsch (Gambit from X-Men Origins: Wolverine) playing a naval officer who is also the Admiral's future son-in-law, and Rihanna also starring in the film. Yes, I said Rihanna. Her role....drum-roll please....a fellow high-ranking crew mate and weapons specialist. And that deserves a big WTF.

Hungry Hungry Hippos coming to a theater near you

The film is being directed by Peter Berg, who has a good track record when it comes to action films, however the casting is atrocious in this film. Neeson clearly has the chops to play a leading figure in the film, but adding young names like Kitsch and Rihanna, both of whom are nowhere near the acting credibility of Neeson, is a big fumble. This is Hollywood's attempt at making the film appeal to a broader audience instead of focusing on making an adaptation like this work, which would be a "Hunt for Red October" kind of atmosphere, and even that's a stretch. I'm just left pondering how Rihanna can convincingly play a high-ranking crew mate and weapons specialist, when her real-life counterpart can't even dodge a few punches from Chris Brown. Adding insult to injury, the film is aiming big with a tentative summer 2012 release date, and I'm calling sink on this ship.

A board-game adaptation done right...Clue.

Believe it or not, this isn't the first time Hollywood has reached into the world of board games for film adaptations. Back in 1985, a little gem of a film called "Clue" was based on the popular board game of the same name and is often considered a cult classic. So why am I bashing Battleship and not Clue? Because Clue was a farce and never took itself seriously. The film was intentionally silly and played with the absurdness found in mystery and thriller novels. Not to mention the film was hysterically cast with Tim Curry leading the bunch as Wadsworth the Butler. The point is Hollywood needs to stop taking adaptations so serious and get to the root of what made the original creative medium so good in the first place. If that's not the case, then I'm still going to wait for a Horror "Torture-Porn" adaptation of Hungry, Hungry, Hippos; I mean, the board-game left so many questions unanswered.

I'm sorry, but Speed Racer was an adaptation done right

Besides Clue, my idea of a perfect adaptation is Speed Racer. I know a lot of people laugh when I say that, but if you ever watched the old anime series, you'll see it was light-hearted with flashy animation, wacky dialogue, and great racing sequences. But because neither the show nor the film appealed to a mainstream audience, movie-goers shunned it and it became a box office disaster. (Not to mention it was also competing with "Iron-Man" at the time.) I've said it before in my blog about comic-book adaptations, but if Hollywood is going to continue pulling out all these weird adaptations then they need to be a little more faithful to the source. If you're source appeals to a specific audience, then don't inflate the budget of your film and make it the way it's supposed to be (Speed Racer, Clue, Kick-Ass) But if you're going to go all gung-ho and change the tone and style of your source material (GI Joe, Transformers 2, Last Airbender) and continue to appeal to the "tweenie" movie-goers who have attention spans the size of a walnut, then may God help us all.