It's taken nearly twenty years for Producer Joel Silver to bring DC Comics' Sgt. Rock to the big screen.  The film has passed through numerous writers and directors and even in today's comic-book-hero drenched cinema landscape, but it's hard out there for a guy who just wants to serve his country even though he has no superpowers.  Now it looks like I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence is going take a shot at enlisting the character.  Hit the jump for details.

According to Heat Vision, Lawrence is attached to direct Sgt. Rock with Chad St. John handling the script.  Silver will team up with the world's best paid and lousiest writer Akiva Goldsman to produce the film.

Sgt. Frank Rock, leader of his infantry unit, Easy Company (but definitely not like the Easy Company soldiers featured in Band of Brothers) first appeared in a 1959 issue of "Our Army at War".  In 1977, the comic was renamed Sgt. Rock and ran until 1988.  With Lawrence signing onto Sgt. Rock, it looks like his potential projects with Will Smith, a prequel to I Am Legend and The City That Sailed, have been put on the backburner to the dismay of no one.

Up until now, Rock has maintained its World War II setting but now Warner Bros. wants to bring the story to the present day because maybe that will get it off the ground and remove the appearance of American jingoism because the last thing people want to see are American soldiers fighting bad guys.  Those lines are well-drawn today as we fight brown people from the Middle East who don't like us for a variety of reasons.

Folks seemed to really enjoy Inglourious Basterds so maybe we can finally have World War II action movies without the heavy drama.  Also, if you want to escape the appearance of jingoism, then bringing Rock into the modern day or giving him an international team like G.I. Joe isn't going to solve the issue because we know terrorists are bad people but I don't know how you move Sgt. Rock to today or any post-World War II conflict since we lost all of those and Americans enjoy the first five minutes of a war and then want us declaring victory by suppertime.  If anything, IB should clear the path for the long-delayed film because I'm told that the killin'-Nazi business is-a-boomin'.