by: S. Scott Stanikmas

Tom Hardy teased a DC Comics project a while back while promoting Mad Max: Fury Road, and I couldn’t for the life of me guess what he was doing. From his description, it could have been damn near anything from the DC Universe:

It contains elements of all kinds of stuff. From Ocean’s Eleven, to Batman, you can get all the wrappers out and it would be a big, really cool, technicolor Pulp Fiction. It’s a psychological fuckfest, it’s absolutely awesome. It’s as if you would take Transmetropolitan and make it happen, but it’s not that out there [as in a futuristic cyberpunk world]. It’s something which is much more real world. It could be like Heat, it could be fucking awesome.

Well, now the cat has been let out of the bag. The Hollywood Reporter has the word that Hardy will produce and possibly star in a film adaptation of the crime-noir comic 100 Bullets.

Apparently a script has already been written, by The Vatican Tapes scribe Chris Borelli. With that out of the way, this project could move forward at a slightly quicker pace.

The comic book, which came from writer Brian Azzarello and artist Eduardo Risso, told the story of a shadowy G-man named Agent Graves who would offer someone an untraceable gun and 100 rounds of untraceable ammo as well as immunity to exact revenge. Eventually the comic evolved into so much  that the 100^th and final issue barely resembled the first that came out so many years before.

I don’t know how I feel about this as a film. I’ve always been of the mind that this would work best as a TV show, allowed to percolate and evolve over the course of a few years. Unless they plan a multi-film project (which, aren’t they always), I don’t know much faith I have in this project.

I have been proven wrong before with Vertigo Comics properties though. I thoroughly enjoyed The Losers, and that took over 2 dozen issues of a slow burn revenge thriller and boiled t down to a 2 hour film that blew me away with its blend of action and humor.

Hopefully this works out. 100 Bullets was one of my favorite comics when it was coming out on a monthly basis. I’d like to see this property done right.

As for who Tom Hardy could play? I can only think of two charcaters that would fit him – the cool-as-a-cucumber Minuteman Cole Burns or the psychopathic loose cannon Lono. If it was either of those two I’d be happy with his choice.