Today in But Is It About Family News, Bradley Cooper will reportedly star in a Bullitt reboot(ish) to be directed by Steven Spielberg. Bullitt is the classic 1968 Steve McQueen film that features one of the greatest car chases in cinema history. In the film, McQueen stars as a San Francisco cop on the trail of a mob boss, and it is a good film all the way through, but the car chase is its most memorable element. McQueen is one of cinema’s coolest guys, but he’s cool in a lot of movies (see also: The Getaway, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Cincinnati Kid, The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape). What Bullitt has that no other McQueen movie has is that car chase. So I get why Bullitt is ripe for reimagination. Most people don’t know the movie, they know the chase scene. “Detective Frank Bullitt”—which scores exceptionally high on the Fake Name Improbability Scale—is not a household character name. The film lingers as an impression of cool guys driving cool cars, so there’s a ton of room to play with the concept.
This is not a remake of Bullitt, it is to be a “new story” featuring Detective Frank Bullitt, so it’s a reboot, kind of. It’s rebooting the idea of “Bullitt” into the modern cinematic landscape, anyway. Coop and Spielberg have been dancing around each other for years—Spielberg backed out of directing American Sniper, and almost directed A Star Is Born—so this is their long-awaited consummation at last, a, well, fancy Fast & Furious movie. It’s gotta be, right? Remember how The Fast and the Furious started? Paul Walker playing an undercover cop trying to bust a ring of electronics thieves who did illegal street racing, too. Now, Bradley Cooper is going to play a cop who will, undoubtedly, end up in some kind of cool car chase. Spielberg directed a GREAT chase scene in Tin Tin, he will undoubtedly do something incredible in live action, too. But no matter what they do, however they try to class it up, I shall henceforth think of the Spielberg/BCoop Bullitt movie as “fancy Fast & Furious”. I wonder how many times Coop will say “family”?
Here's Coop out yesterday in New York.
