Let’s be honest, Daniel Radcliffe is making all the right moves. After the staggering success of the Harry Potter franchise, it’d have been awfully easy for him to rest on his laurels, coasting by on the fame and fortune that those films earned him. In fact, we’ve seen a lot of young stars do exactly that, but it seems like Radcliffe’s determined to turn himself into a legitimate leading man, and he seems to be well on his way to doing so – if he hasn’t already.
While the actor still does sign on for the occasional big budget flick, he’s also becoming an increasingly popular figure in indie cinema, with his Harry Potter cachet allowing directors to secure funding for their weirdest pet projects. How else do you explain last year’s brilliant Swiss Army Man, in which his reanimated corpse farted its way through a film that baffled and amused those brave enough to stump up for a ticket?
Now, he’s diving headfirst into another interesting project, one that presents him with a very physically challenging role – at least, if the trailer above is anything to go by. We’re talking about Greg McLean’s (Wolf Creek) survival movie Jungle, which is based on the novel by Yossi Ginsberg and chronicles the author’s real-life survival story when he was stranded for 3 weeks in the Amazon jungle back in 1981.
As you can see in the footage above, the pic appears to be an intense and riveting thriller, one in which Radcliffe must contend with the might of Mother Nature. The plot seems simple enough, with the former Harry Potter star embarking on a journey into the wilderness with a mysterious guide, before everything goes wrong and he finds himself alone in the middle of nowhere, totally dependent on his intelligence and luck to survive. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before as far as story and structure go, but McLean looks to have crafted a truly compelling movie here, one that’ll no doubt have us on the edge of our seats as we watch Mr. Radcliffe knock it out of the park once again.
Jungle will climb into theatres next month, on October 20th.
