With Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane, Narc, Smokin’ Aces, The A-Team and The Grey on his resume, writer-director Joe Carnahan has certainly built his career on badass protagonists who fit traditional ideas of masculinity, which makes him a perfect fit for his next project – Five Against a Bullet, which Sony described recently as being in the spirit of The Wild Bunch and The Magnificent Seven.
The flick, which Carnahan will both direct and rewrite, working off an original script from Alex Litvak, follows a group of five bodyguards recruited to keep a Mexican politician alive during a controversial election after the politician’s father is brutally killed by a major drug cartel. Going off that, we can expect a lot of cool-as-a-cucumber badasses and plenty of explosive action.
Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura recently spoke about Carnahan’s involvement with the project, stating:
“Joe [Carnahan] we just put on a project called ‘Five Against a Bullet,’ which I’ve loved for a long time. It is a tale of a group of men who have become cynical, sort of lost their sense of hope about life and the world, who are rekindled and betrayed and rekindled and betrayed in this story, and it’s got some of the coolest action and some of the greatest characters, and it’s a really fantastic action movie that I think will really grab people. And Joe’s working on it right now. We have a great script and no doubt he’ll put a little pen to paper as well, but we’re already in great shape and Sony loves the project and no doubt we’ll start trying to figure out how to cast that.”
Given di Bonaventura’s obvious enthusiasm for Five Against a Bullet, hopefully it will be met with a better fate than Carnahan’s last big screen project, a Patrick Wilson action-comedy titled Stretch. Though it received very positive reviews from those who were lucky enough to see it, it was deemed too difficult to market by the studio and is still sitting on a shelf somewhere.
Published: Jun 25, 2014 02:19 pm