I’d heard that the Lobo project for Warner Brothers was going ahead a while back but this is something I was not expecting. I like Guy Ritchie. Quite a bit, actually, and whenever I read a Lobo book I would always imagine that he talks like Bullet Tooth Tony. It just seems right. But there’s a problem.
Variety is reporting that not only is Guy Ritchie set to helm the project, they’re using Don Payne’s (The Simpsons, Rise of the Silver Surfer) script where Lobo comes to Earth and winds up joining forces with a teenage girl in order to take down four fugitives from space who are hellbent on fucking shit up on Earth. This sounds like no Lobo comic I’ve ever read, and that’s not really the problem. That could easily be full of carnage and made-up curse words from space. The real problem is that the studio is shooting for the dreaded PG-13 rating, which more or less takes the piss out of Lobo, entirely.
Evidenced by Drag Me To Hell, a good genre movie can ride the edge of PG-13ville and Rated R-burgh and still be a hell of a lot of fun, but Lobo, more or less, needs to be a constant stream of dismemberment, decapitation and disembowelment, stopping only occasionally to let Lobo light a new cigar and you just can’t pull that off while keeping the bodycount low. It’s disappointing, really, because the studios tend to put the least effort into these minor properties while Batman gets the royal treatment. I guess I still have my Lobo comics to fall back on.
September 3, 2009 10:58 pm
The only schtick lobo has is his woman’izing, language and violence. Without them he is just another clone of a generic anti hero. It would be just like if they said “Ok, we want to make a movie based on the punisher, but we cant have guns and the violence has to be mainstream teen friendly”. They might as well just title this “Lobo!: The post castration years”.
I never could understand why they would create a movie based off previous source material and then throw out what made people love the original material to begin with.
Not to say Im a mindless beer swilling college halo playing frat boy that assumes “guns, tits, violence makes everything better” as Im not, but when your basing something off something where that was the only main attraction then your doing something wrong.
They might as well just make a brand new character to fit what they want and make a unique film. Not to mention not alot of mainstream people dont even know the hell lobo is aside from comic purists, even like the green lantern movie coming out has an attraction because while most dont know who or what GL is they atleast know the name. Lobo sounds like a fucking western movie title to me without knowledge of who lobo is. And what, is ritchie gonna make the entire cast english and talk gangster stuff the whole movie? Because thats all he can well and even that is getting old after like his 3rd stab at it.