After nearly five years of nomadic wandering, the feature film version of 1970s TV series Kung Fu may have at last found its master in Bill Paxton, who is in talks to direct the story of a Shaolin monk traveling the back roads of the American West, as he tries to avoid practicing the martial arts that are in the very title of his show. (Had his show only been titled Maybe I’ll Grab Some Lunch, he might have fared better.) Paxton is just the latest candidate to be attached to a project that’s been in the works for nearly five years now: Former Akira directors and Asian studies majors The Hughes Brothers were working on a “darker, grittier” version with original producer Ed Spielman as far back as 2006, and of course, the circumstances surrounding the death of David Carradine in 2009 most likely tabled that discussion for a while.
But we’re past all that now, with the only lingering controversy likely to be the long-standing argument that the Kung Fu concept was stolen from Bruce Lee, a subject that should make for an easy sidebar whenever this movie eventually gets written up in Entertainment Weekly. John J. McLaughlin (Black Swan and, uh, Man Of The House) will write this latest script, while Paxton—whose directing credits include the solid psychological thriller Frailty and the reason your grandfather knows who Shia LaBeouf is, the Disney golf drama The Greatest Game Ever Played—will bring his knack for character studies along with his own personal Zen philosophy, which says that no man can put himself before others because all men are as one in the eyes of the universe, especially if those other men are Bill Pullman.