Movie Matchmaker: Quentin Tarantino’s Grand Theft Auto
by Tom Burns

WHAT TARANTINO NEEDS TO INCLUDE IN A GTA MOVIE:

Okay, let’s say Quentin has signed on to direct, Robert Rodriguez is his camera operator, the RZA is working on the soundtrack - in terms of script, what does any good GTA movie need to have? After long and careful consideration, it seems clear to us that the game that has to be adapted first is Grand Theft Auto III. It was the first GTA game to rocket into the stratosphere, it completely flipped the franchise on its ear, it has the most nostalgic appeal of any of the games, and it has one of the most adaptable storylines. We love Vice City and San Andreas, but their stories are almost too obviously based on Hollywood films. (Grand Theft Auto IV looks like it definitely has some parallels to Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises.) Sure, we love a good Scarface reference as much as the next guy, but Vice City, plot-wise, is just a little too familiar for a straight film adaptation. And, don’t get us wrong, no GTA movie needs to follow the game’s storyline EXACTLY, but GTA 3 has the most elements that we’d want to see Tarantino piece together into a big-ticket film.

This might sound crazy, but we really believe that Claude, the mute protagonist of GTA 3, has to be the lead character. His look is just so iconic, and we secretly love the idea of saddling Tarantino (a guy known for his dialogue) with a near-silent leading man. We don’t want the silence to be jokey like Silent Bob or Vinnie Jones in Gone in 60 Seconds, but we think that having a dialogue-free lead, communicating to us (and everyone else) with only his emotive face and eyes, might be the best chance ever for a film to replicate the experience of playing a videogame. By staying silent, Claude becomes our avatar, our window into the film and the action within, and it would work much, much better than those stupid POV shots in the Doom movie. For casting, the only actor we can think of who’s talented enough to pull off the requisite silence and violence is Clive Owen, but he might be a bit old and, following the self-parodying Shoot ‘Em Up, it might be hard to take him serious in an action role. While some people might be screaming for Claude to be a young ambitious punk, we’re really nervous about a movie studio deciding that someone like Channing Tatum would be the most demographically-popular choice. Other choices that might work would be Casey Affleck (watch Gone Baby Gone before you judge), Emile Hirsch (if you want to go young), Leonardo DiCaprio (watch The Departed before you judge), or Ewan McGregor (who really has never done a bad-ass action lead yet and, no, we’re not counting The Island).

For the story, we’d ape a lot of the GTA 3 plot, having Claude betrayed by his girlfriend Catalina following a heist, sent to prison while Catalina uses the money to become a major player in the Liberty City mob, escaping in-transit with the help of 8-Ball (his future sidekick and demolitions expert), and then returning to Liberty City, pulling job after job to climb the mafia ladder, all in an attempt to get closer to Catalina and exact his revenge. It’d be part-Mel Gibson’s Payback, part-Miller’s Crossing, as Claude flips mob allegiances back and forth, playing the bad guys against each other as he gathers more and more influence and clout. Salvatore Leone, head of the Leone crime family, HAS to be a major player in any GTA film, not only because he’s a big recurring character in the franchise, but because he’s such a paranoid, vicious mess that he’d make a great movie bad guy - a more unstable and easy-to-manipulate version of Nicholson in The Departed. If De Niro could wake himself out of his career slump, he might be a good Leone, but we’re more thinking of actors that could really turn up the crazy menace of the role. What about Gary Oldman? He was brilliantly gonzo in The Professional, slap some make-up on him, and he could totally play a crazed Italian mob boss (in the tradition of Willem Defoe as a Mexican crime lord in Once Upon a Time in Mexico). For Catalina, you could go commercial (Eva Mendes) or actorly (might be a great US role for Marion Cotillard), and 8-Ball could be straight gangster (Tyrese Gibson) or sarcastic sidekick (Romany Malco), depending on Quentin’s preference.

That’s a pretty loose story outline, but that’s all you really need for a GTA movie – a basic plot structure within which you can insert tons of missions (the movie could get montage-crazy about what Claude does to get promoted in the mob), Quentin’s guaranteed dialogue/pop culture coolness, a fantastic selection of radio hits, some of the game’s most famous locations/moments (there HAS to be a sequence where Claude snipes to protect 8-Ball), and it must, must, must end with an insane 5-star downtown car chase clusterf*** extreme. Think of the final scenes of The Blues Brothers rampaging through Chicago, take out the humor, and THAT’s the level we’re talking about. We’d also need there to be at least a few aerial shots of the skyscraper-dodging car chases to give a nice shout-out to the classic overhead POV of the original GTA game, and it’d be nice if Quentin could figure out a way for Claude to get a rocket launcher and take down a helicopter. (Or are we asking for too much?)

CONCLUSION:

Sorry to get off onto a "dream casting" rant, but the possibility of a Grand Theft Auto movie just inspires those kinds of emotions because a) it would just rock so, so hardcore and b) it will probably never happen. And, if it does, we’re secretly afraid that the producers will either hire whoever directed the last successful urban gangsta flick or get so caught up in the action aspect of the movie that they do something stupid and hire Michael Bay. The reason that the GTA games are so ungodly successful is because of Rockstar’s obsessive knowledge of their subject, their attention to detail, their wicked sense or humor, and their unparalleled sense of intelligent fun. And that’s a perfect fit for Quentin Tarantino. The man understands all of the aspects that make GTA work so damn well, and you can see evidence of that understanding in every single one of his films. The only thing that Hollywood has produced within the last decade that even comes close to the multi-genre coolness of the GTA games are the Kill Bill movies, so let’s just do the easy and honorable thing and bring the two together.

Anyway, we hope this helped you kill some time until Grand Theft Auto IV comes out. We’re going to go back to our tent in front of our local Best Buy and see if we can bribe a stockboy into putting a copy aside.