‘Playground’ Trailer: Luc Besson’s New Web Series Takes Us To Assassin School
French filmmakerLuc Bessonmay be best known for directing visually dazzling sci-fi films likeThe Fifth Elementand the upcomingValerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, but he’s also built up quite a career as a writer. He’s written screenplays for a handful of movies he didn’t direct, includingTaken, The Transporter, andColombiana. His latest scripted foray is a web series calledPlayground, and it’s described as a mixture betweenNikitaandKick-Ass. Watch the firstPlaygroundtrailer below.Varietydebuted the first trailer forPlayground, which was created by Besson and directed byPascal Sid(Behind the Walls) and longtime fight/stunt choreographerOlivier Schneider(Taken, Fast & Furious 6, Spectre). The site calls the show “a high-voltage, Paris-set series about a teenage girl who joins a school for assassins and uncovers the mystery of her parents' death.” Take a look:
The whole “kids as assassins” thing seems a little played out by this point, considering how movies likeBattle Royalemined that territory so well back in 2000 andThe Hunger Gamesbrought the concept back into the zeitgeist a few years ago. After watching that trailer, I don’t really see a lot of similarities toKick-Ass, aside from the inclusion of a teenage girl who’s an excellent fighter. No offense to thePlaygroundteam, but nothing in that trailer holds a candle to anything Hit-Girl does inKick-Ass.
Even if you want to be generous and exclude those comparisons entirely, this looks like it could be a low-budget, not-nearly-as-slick remake of the extended training sequences inMatthew Vaughn’sKingsman: The Secret Service. It’s so reminiscent of that movie, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a section in which thePlaygroundcharacters are asked to kill their own pets. And since the show’s first season only has ten episodes and each one is only between eight and twelve minutes long, we can’t even make the argument that it’ll have more time to delve into the concept more than the movies that have come before it. With that being the case, it’ll all come down to the execution.
This is just one of a staggering 50 (!) new shows greenlit by Blackpills, a French digital studio that’s new on the scene and just signed an exclusive distribution deal with Vice Media. You can watch the entire first season ofPlaygroundright now throughVice’s video hub.
