I missed this news, but apparently Eminem is once again a successful recording artist, with his new album Recovery now ranked as the best-selling album of 2010 (take that, Taylor Swift!) and his skill for attracting attention still alive and well. And now that we've invited him back into pop culture Eminem is going to make sure he stays a while, taking on a high-profile movie role to match his success in music.
According to Vulture, Eminem will be starring in a 20th Century Fox project called Random Acts of Violence, in which he plays a former thug trying to get on the straight and narrow after a stint in prison but brought inevitably back into the criminal fold. He's also targeted by the FBI as a potential mole, and eventually "tries to play both sides against each other long enough to exact revenge against those — on both sides of the law — who sent him to prison in the first place." Yes, it's a familiar scenario, but as The Town proved this fall we never really can get enough of well-told criminal stories. There's no promise this one will be great, of course, but it will likely be directed by Californication's David Von Ancken-- who also did a draft of the screenplay-- so fans of that show can chime in and tell us what to expect.
The strangest thing about this isn't that Eminem is trying to come back as a movie star-- deep down I think we all knew that would happen-- but that Random Acts of Violence actually started its life as the script for a Grand Theft Auto movie. You may not be able to tell when the film is actually made-- all the car-stealing stuff was scrapped when Von Ancken came on-- but fans of the game might be able to draw some interesting parallels. And even if another movie about a former criminal trying to go straight doesn't sound that original, it's a whole lot more interesting than yet another car-stealing franchise-- so we at least have that to be thankful for.
