While Vin Deisel’s return to the Fast and the Furious franchise has Fast Five tearing it up at the box office, the supped up action star has been inking deals to return to comedy.
According to THR, Diesel, whose last comedic turn was the box office bomb Find Me Guilty, has signed onto MGM’s The Machine, an action-comedy penned by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, the writers responsible for the critically reviled but financially stellar Diesel-comedy, The Pacifier.
Diesel will serve as producer on the project and will also star as a machine man, or as MGM describes it, “a human-like machine created in secrecy by the Pentagon as the world’s first true ultimate weapon. Twenty years after the project was buried and decommissioned for reasons unknown, The Machine is discovered by a kid who befriends him. When the government learns it has been reactivated, the Machine must protect the family harboring him.”
Notably, THR is commending MGM (whose known for remakes) for taking on “an original project,” but you might notice the plots bears a striking resemble to another Vin Diesel movie: The Iron Giant. In that woefully underrated animated feature, Diesel voiced the giant, an extraterrestrial machine man who crashes onto Earth in the midst of the Cold War and befriends a pint-sized outsider named Hogarth. The boy soon discovers his new playmate is actually a giant weapon, but he teaches the giant he has a choice in who he is, and need not be defined by the massive artillery inside of him. This doesn’t detract from the government’s fear of this invader that they assume to be a Russian weapon. When the army rolls into town, the giant has to step up to defend the boy and his family….so yeah, The Machine is The Iron Giant minus the genius of Brad Bird – with the writers of The Pacifier.
No director has been selected yet, but MGM is aiming to shoot The Machine this fall.
What do you think of The Machine?