Spy Hunter film next July

Former professional wrestling bloke turned actor Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's been talking up the film version of Midway's Spy Hunter - which is now down for release in July next year.

Scripted by Stuart Beattie, the Spy Hunter film is "well-written" but "not overly complicated", The Rock told Hollywood Byte, and aims to capture the same sense of humour as Indiana Jones - comic however drastic the circumstance.

Rock-man's confident, then. "Some of the set pieces that were written are absolutely mind-blowing," he said, although he concedes that "A lot of times the successful videogame doesn't always equate to a successful movie," and "all comes down to the writing".

So is that what's wrong with the Doom film then? Nope - "that's not a knock to how Doom was written," apparently. The Rock starred in that, playing Sarge. "Doom was very straightforward and that's the way it should have been. There wasn't a lot of room. We made it for a very specific audience and I was happy with the way it was written and the way it turned out," he says.

Full steam ahead for Spy Hunter then (or full whatever-applies-to-car-and-bike ahead), and if you're interested in seeing how The Rock adapts to the role of Alex Decker you won't have that long to wait - the film might not be out until next July, but in the meantime the former Scorpion King's got a date with Spy Hunter: Nowhere To Run on PS2 and Xbox, which is due out this summer, and for which he did all the mo-cap and so on.

"I asked how much control could I have over the different ways that the character can kill people with his bare hands? And they were like you can have complete control, so we came up with a bunch of really, really cool, inventive ways to do away with the opponents, so to speak," he told Hollywood Byte. Groovy, then.

For more of The Rock's musings on games, check out Hollywood Byte.