'Just Cause' Movie Zeroes In On 'Stuber' And 'Goon' Director Michael Dowse

Hollywood has been trying to make a movie adaptation of the popular action/adventure video game Just Cause for more than a decade, and it seems like its producers have finally settled on a director. Michael Dowse, who recently directed the action comedy Stuber and directed the beloved sports movie Goon, has been hired to take the reins here, directing a screenplay that's being written by John Wick writer Derek Kolstad.

The four Just Cause games follow a special ops soldier named Rico Rodriguez who is essentially dropped into enemy territory and tasked with destroying their strongholds to help save the world. The plots often take a backseat to the utterly ludicrous chaos that you can drum up as the protagonist: you're given complete freedom in how you approach your missions, which often results in the type of spectacularly ridiculous and explosive action scenes that probably populate Michael Bay's dreams. In addition to more traditional weapons, Rico Rodriguez is equipped with a grappling hook, wing suit, and a parachute, and using a combination of all those items creates chaos of the highest level. Here's the trailer for the most recent game to give you an idea of the Fast and Furious-style action on display:

The question, of course, is whether a game series that's so inherently reliant on its players linking creative decisions into epic destruction will be able to translate any of that into a passive narrative experience. Nothing in Michael Dowse's filmography so far makes him a glaringly obvious choice for handling such wide-scale cinematic destruction, but Deadline reports that this movie will use Robert Zemeckis's Romancing the Stone as an influence, and Dowse is adept at having two people bicker their way through high-stakes situations. So who knows – maybe this will work out after all. Then again, the number of movies that have tried and failed to capture Romancing the Stone's great Michael Douglas/Kathleen Turner dynamic is too high to count, so this will be a tough nut to crack.

Writer Derek Kolstad managed to make John Wick more interesting than your average revenge film by dropping the lead character into a cinematic world with its own mysterious societal hierarchies and unique rules, so perhaps he can flesh out the world a bit here and immerse us in the environment in a similar fashion. Kolstad will produce alongside Constantin Film's Robert Kulzer and Prime Universe Film's Adrian Askarieh. No studio distributor is on board yet.