Not too long ago it was in the nerd-news that Samuel L. Jackson had signed on to play the character “Nick Fury” in as many as nine Marvel Comics movies. Some people said, “Well, that’s not surprising. Samuel L. Jackson will sign onto anything!” But that’s not really fair, they were probaly just actors who were bitter because they didn’t get the roles in THE SPIRIT, CLEANER, RULES OF ENGAGEMENT, S.W.A.T., SOUL MEN, JUMPER, HOME OF THE BRAVE, FREEDOMLAND, FARCE OF THE PENGUINS, BASIC, CHANGING LANES, SPHERE, LOADED WEAPON 1, etc.
Where does this Nick Fury come from? Probaly some comic book, but in my opinion mainly from this TV movie starring David Hasselhoff. I actually have wanted to see this for years because it was written by David Goyer in the same year he did BLADE, but they rarely showed it on TV. One time I happened to catch part of it on cable so I checked to see when it would air again – never, it turned out. That was the one and only scheduled airing. But that was before Fury Fever swept the nation, so now it’s on DVD.
This is very clearly made for TV. The sets (lots of high tech headquarters and labs) look cheesy, the female leads are from soap operas, the CGI vehicles look like models from ROBOTJOX, and Nick Fury asks his team to go “kick some butt” which might be appropriate language if he was playing a Presbyterian pastor turned soccer coach, but not as much for a seen-it-all military badass. Still, I’ll be damned if I didn’t enjoy this more than some of the more lush comic book productions including but not limited to DAREDEVIL, GHOST RIDER, FANTASTIC FOUR and SAMUEL L. JACKSON’S THE SPIRIT. Maybe that’s partly because there’s no capes or masks, this is more like an action movie. (more…)
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