| Nick Fury: Agent of Shield (1998) | |
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Rating: 3.7/10 (3,161 votes) Director: Rod Hardy Writer: David S. Goyer Stars: David Hasselhoff, Lisa Rinna, Sandra Hess Runtime: 120 min Rated: TV-14 Genre: Action, Sci-Fi Released: 26 May 1998 |
| Plot: Agent Nick Fury is asked to fight the menace of Hydra after exiling himself in the Yukon since the end of the Cold War. | |
A decade before Sam Jackson walked onto a post-credit scene, asking Robert Downey Jr what he knew about the Avengers Initiative, we comic book fans had this take on the character of Nick Fury. Set sometime after Fury had quit SHIELD – he had no place after the collapse of the iron curtain – the TV movie sees Hydra surface, threatening to unleash a deadly toxin on New York unless a ransom of (cue Dr Evil impression), “One million dollars!” is paid out to them. Only one man can save the day….David Hasselhoff!
To be fair, Hasselhoff throws himself into the role quite well. He chews on cigar ends, sneers, bellows, disrespects authority, and has a fair stab at representing the character. With his eyepatch, dark hair, and dominating presence on screen, he certainly fits the part of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s creation well. However, he seems to be purely playing a comic book character, and so doesn’t really do anything to make Fury seem more real. Encumbered with lines of dialogue that are so packed with cheese that Dairylee are threatening to sue, the result is that he comes over as more of a parody of Fury. Sandra Hess doesn’t do much better as Andrea Von Strucker, aka. Viper. A dubious accent, tendency to stare wildly, and laughing manically put her part firmly in the pantomime branch of acting. Seriously, at one point in the film I shouted out, “He’s behind you!” before realising that my TV doesn’t interact back with me, and that waking my family up at 3am shouting at it doesn’t go down well.
As a TV movie, especially in the 90s, the budget was quite
clearly lacking the chances of taking this film as anything more than a guilty
pleasure after a few drinks are minimal.
The first shot of the SHIELD heli-carrier resulted in fits of laughter
for around 5 minutes. Looking like it
would be considered too cheap an effect shot for even Gerry Anderson to use, it
looks as though someone grabbed an Airfix model of the carrier CVN-65 (bonus
geek points if you know what it was renamed to) and slapped some parts from
broken vacuum cleaners on it. That, by
the way, is one of the better effects shots of the whole movie! The rest wouldn’t be out of place in episodes
of Blake’s Seven (before anyone gets tetchy over that, I love Blake’s Seven,
but the budget restrictions led to some ropey effects work).
It’s not a dead loss
though. There are scattered references
to comic book lore throughout for fans to watch for, be it names of characters
or showing us LMDs (Life Model Decoys), and taken as a dose of daft fun, it
entertains enough to pass the time. It
is clear watching it that it was intended as a pilot to test the water for a
possible series, with an ending that is a blatant set up for future
threats. But sadly the whole thing seems
that it would have felt dated even in 1998.
It’s curious that this was scripted by David Goyer, who would go on to
be known as the guy who penned Nolan’s Dark Knight films. In the same year as Nick Fury came out,
Goyer’s name was also attached to two much better projects, Dark City and
Blade. Both of those films have similar
contrivances of dialogue and plot that encumber Nick Fury, yet work so much
better, which lands the blame of what went wrong at the feet of the
director.
