Morgan Freeman tends to play nice guys. Wise sages. He’s even played God in a couple of films.
Thankfully he’s just as sick of the nice image as the rest of us – he’s signed on to play an assassin in the movie adaptation of Mark Millar’s comic book Wanted*. He’s not straying too far off course – he’ll be a sage mentor, but this time in the killing arts. Actually, that’s not a very big stretch from the role he played in Nurse Betty, but after he went over the top with the nice guy characters (the saintly blind man in Unleashed), I’ll take what I can get.
James McAvoy will play a schmuck who discovers that his father was a super assassin; Freeman will be Sloane, who trains McAvoy in the way of the gun. Somehow the guys who wrote 2Fast 2Furious were allowed to write this film.
* As I document here, the film version of Wanted, directed by flash in the pan Russian guy “East” Timur Bekmambetov, bears very little resemblance to the comic book on which it is ostensibly based.