David Ayer Says His Remake Of The Dirty Dozen Is Still A Moving Target
Robert Aldrich's "The Dirty Dozen" is the daddiest of dad movies. A box office smash upon its theatrical release in 1967, it was the proto-"men-on-a-mission" movie. Lee Marvin stars as a World War II U.S. Army major ordered to lead a pack of disposable military prisoners on a suicide mission to slaughter numerous high-ranking Nazi officers. The film brought together some of the most macho men on the planet to play the (not entirely) doomed soldiers: Charles Bronson, George Kennedy, Telly Savalas, and, of course, recently retired Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown (the producers tried to recruit John Wayne, but he found the material amoral). It was a testosterone-fueled must-see that inspired three made-for-TV sequels and a load of imitators (including Enzo G. Castellari's "The Inglorious Bastards" and Quentin Tarantino's endearingly misspelled "Inglourious Basterds").
It's been homaged and ripped off so many times over the last 57 years that a straight-up remake would hardly be sacrilege. In fact, given that the title still carries a charge for Baby Boomers and their Gen X offspring, failing to capitalize on the brand name would be an irresponsible missed opportunity for today's IP-obsessed studio executives.
So why hasn't David Ayer's remake, which went into development at Warner Bros in 2019, moved forward over the last five years? According to the writer-director, the project is still very much in play.
What would The Dirty Dozen look like in 2024?
In an exclusive interview with /Film's Ben Pearson, Ayer, who's currently promoting his Jason Statham actioner "The Beekeeper," revealed that a greenlight is contingent on justifying the remake's existence. As Ayer told Pearson:
"I think we're still kicking the tires on that and trying to find the right angle. It's always difficult to take such a beloved and iconic IP and then answer the question of 'Why now? Why is this worthy of redoing now?' So it's always a moving target."
When Ayer discussed the project four years ago, he talked about turning "The Dirty Dozen" into an ensemble franchise à la "Mission: Impossible" or "The Fast and the Furious." Ayer explained, "It's like anything," he said, "You build an amazing family of characters, and then you watch them bounce off of each other and drive each other crazy."
He was, however, resistant to the idea of attempting a WWII-era redo. "[I] can do that present day," he said, "And have that fun and anarchy and wildness, and have modern characters with incredible diversity and real voices."
No one should have a problem with this in theory. I just hope, if it does eventually go into production, they work up a better screenplay than the aborted remake "Con Air" scripter Scott Rosenberg wrote for Joel Silver in 2006. There might be a .pdf out there in the wilds of the internet, and it's an inadvertent master class in failing to understand why the original worked in the first place.