Nick Fury: Agent of Shield
Director: Rod Hardy
Year: 1998
Rating: 5.0
Damn you Hydra! Back again and with intentions to rule the world! Only SHIELD
and Nick Fury stand in their way. This actually seems as best as I can tell
the only film in which Fury is the main character - of course this was years
before the Marvel Movie Universe. It is a TV movie and considering that is
the medium I give it credit for effort. 1998 and they are doing Nick Fury.
Of course, it takes a while before I got used to Fury as a white man and
a white man named David Hasselhoff but he keeps his shirt on for the entire
film. It is hard to know if this is parody or just exaggerating the comic
book esthetics. Fury sounds like he eats glass for breakfast while the villainess
is all snarls and wickedness who almost orgasms when she shoots a defenseless
man as she prowls around in low cut leather.
Fury goes far back in the Marvel archives. Created in 1963 by Stan Lee and
Jack Kirby in a Sergeant in the American army during WWII (Sgt Fury and His
Howling Commandos). Rough, tough, gruff and mean. And though he is no longer
fighting in WWII his persona has stayed the same. Now he is part of a US
govt Security Force - SHIELD - that he introduced in 1965 in a Strange Tales
episode. And he has been going strong ever since. In the new Marvel Universe,
he is somewhat of a secondary character because he has no super powers of
his own but he often ties it all together. Needless to say Samuel Jackson
is no David Hasselhoff but he is fine.
Hydra breaks into the SHIELD fortress where they are holding the cryogenic
body of Von Strucker and take it away. His two psycho children are behind
this. SHIELD has to call back Fury who was booted out of the organization
five years ago and for some reason is living in a tunnel in a mountainside.
Hydra plans to drop a virus in NYC that is airborne and deadly. Why go to
the trouble I thought. Just wait for Trump to be President. Fury is poisoned
but Viper is kind enough to give him the 48-hours to die version. Later on
Fury and his two cohorts get captured but no problem - his fake eye is a
bomb and though thoroughly searched Fury manages to use a full body plastic
lookalike decoy later on. Where he pulled that out of I don't know but I
sure am not touching it. They have some ok TV special effects (for 1998),
such as the giant flying headquarters. Clearly, the ending suggests that
the filmmakers had hopes of a sequel or a TV series but it was not to be.
This gets a cruel 3.7 on IMDB - by no means good but it deserves better than
that if you are in a charitable mood.
