The multitalented Martin Campbell is busy currently prepping his newest directorial effort Hunter Killer. The new action thriller that is set to star Gerard Butler, Billy Bob Thornton and Willem Defoe is currently in pre-production and will no doubt be another entertaining notch in Campbell’s rich body of work. The New Zealander himself is the man behind two very different James Bond efforts.
Campbell helmed the 1995 release of GoldenEye which saw Pierce Brosnan in his first outing as the famed secret agent. Then subsequently 11 years later he was also the man behind the lens for British actor Daniel Craig’s first appearance as 007 in Casino Royale. The latter took a very different approach to that of previous Bond efforts focusing on much darker and more serious elements of Bond’s secret agent lifestyle. The numerous casino scenes showed a much more modern Bond, one with vast skills on the tables of the Casino Royale, which we like to imagine he gained by playing polo bingo on bingosites.net. It was an impressive piece of work that was very dissimilar to that of the more traditional Bond-style of GoldenEye.
Whilst Campbell has managed to show just how diverse his directorial range is by tackling two very different styles and themes, despite both of them being part of the same hugely successful franchise, the producer and director has also managed to bring audiences a certain level of excitement and cinematic thrills in other genres.
Following GoldenEye Martin Campbell decided to tackle a reworking of swashbuckling classic The Mask of Zorro. With Spanish heartthrob Antonio Banderas donning the mask and the beautiful Catherine Zeta-Jones along for the ride this fun little action adventure piece further solidified the director as a versatile filmmaker. A couple of years later he swapped the Mexican landscapes for the chilly high-adrenaline thriller Vertical Limit which took cast and crew to the Asian mountain range as well as New Zealand for the challenging shoot.
Even at the ripe old age of 71 director Campbell continues to churn out exciting projects for both film and television and back in 2011 he turned his hand to a live-action version of classic DC Comics character the Green Lantern. With Ryan Reynolds in the title role as Hal Jordan this marked the first theatrical outing for the character that had been around since 1940 in comic book format. It certainly had a more comedic and tongue-in-cheek style that was warmly welcomed especially after a whole run of Avenger’s based Marvel movies we’d been exposed to for the years leading up to it. Unfortunately it didn’t quite have the strength of other superhero movies at the time and has long since been forgotten about in the grand scheme of the comic to feature universe.
