When 20th Century Fox made Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief in 2010, it was just another in a long line of youth fantasy films for the studio -- including franchise non-starters Eragon, The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, and City of Ember -- that was designed to cash in on Potter-mania. As you can imagine, it was quite a coup for them to get Chris Columbus in the director's chair; Columbus had helmed the first two Harry Potter films, and was instrumental in bringing J.K. Rowling's beloved books to life on screen for Warner Brothers. His involvement with Percy Jackson lent a legitimacy and creative weight that none of Fox's other Young Adult projects had. The end result was a well-produced, well-cast movie, with a tone that was a bit more lighthearted and campy than the Potter movies -- perfectly suiting a series that is meant to hark back to classic Ray Harryhausen monster movies like Sinbad or Clash of the Titans.
Hollywood has certainly gone crazy with the comic book adaptations in recent years, and I'm not just talking superheroes like The Avengers and Man of Steel. Most people don't realize that Road to Perdition with Tom Hanks, RED with Bruce Willis, and AMC's hit television show, The Walking Dead, are adaptations of popular comic book stories, too. This week's I-didn't-know-it-was-a-comic-book release is 2 Guns, based on the Boom! Studios series by Steven Grant.
In the film, Bobby (Denzel Washington) and Stig (Mark Wahlberg) are swindlers working both sides of the Texas/Mexico border to move drugs and money and anything else they can, in order to make some dough. After getting stiffed on a deal for some cocaine by cartel boss Papi Greco (Edward James Olmos), the two decide to rob a bank where Papi keeps $3 million in drug money, but somehow end up with $43 million that doesn't belong to Papi at all. It quickly becomes clear that the two men are not who they're pretending to be, and as the heat comes down from every direction -- with Papi, the CIA, and rogue military officers all wanting the money for themselves -- Bobby and Stig will need to trust each other and stick together in order to survive.
