Of late, my dreams have been telling me that I am a frustrated action movie director.
For example, Sunday night, I enjoyed a spectacular movie with Jason Statham as the protagonist and Don Cheadle as his sidekick - two prisoners in a maximum-security prison trying to survive a violent riot triggered by a group of prisoners who had deliberately allowed themselves to be imprisoned there so as to cause the riot and get to an important prisoner whom their employer wanted dead.
Statham's character was that action movie staple - the violent man with an unshakable (if quixotic) personal code of honour and finds himself fighting on the side of angels.
The twist? The characters were all based on the Grecio-Roman gods. Statham's violent ex-army prisoner was Ares. Cheadle's crippled technical genius was based on Hephestus and the two men had to get over the fact that Statham's beautiful but utterly unfaithful wife had an affair with Cheadle's character some time in the not-distant past. What's more (and this is my weird brain at work) as the plot progresses, it becomes increasingly unclear whether the characters are based on the Grecio-Roman gods or if they are the Grecio-Roman gods. There are SFX moments that may be 'miraculous powers' and the villains are 'Herc', 'Jason' and 'Percy', who are the bastard sons of some Mafia leadership figure known only as 'Jove'.
