re:mote voices

Title: Nick Fury: Agent Of SHIELD

Cast: David Hasselhoff, Lisa Rinna, Sandra Hess, Neil Roberts, Gary Chalk, Tracy Waterhouse

Director: Rod Hardy

This film is one of the host of lesser known characters from Marvel comics to be given the cinematic treatment. In real terms Spiderman, The Hulk, and more recently the X-Men are the properties that are reasonably well known. Which hasn’t stopped there being adaptations of Dr. Strange, Captain America, Daredevil, and two attempts at the Punisher. Somewhere in there I somehow managed to miss the adaptation of Nick Fury: Agent Of SHIELD, with David Hasselohoff in the title role.

Nick Fury is the top agent of an international espionage and law agency, who has been put into forced retirement with the end of the cold war. However when the top terrorist organisation Hydra regroup, and steal the boy of Fury’s nemesis Baron von Strucker, he is summoned by the president to head up SHIELD once more. Baron von Strucker’s body contains the last samples of a deadly virus, which Hydra can extract and hold the world hostage to it’s demands.

The film has the whole cast of the SHIELD versus Hydra narrative. With which, the film is perhaps too close to someone’s idea of the comic book form – providing a veneer of the absurd, especially with the sense that everyone is taking things that little bit too seriously. Nick Fury is embarrassingly over the top from start to finish, such that it can only really be treated as a comedy – even if that wasn’t the intent.