Otto Bathurst, the up-and-coming TV helmer who just took the reins on Lionsgate’s blockbuster Robin Hood: Origins, is putting together a pretty stellar cast for action-thriller Three Seconds. Today brings news that Josh Brolin, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Olivia Munn have all signed on for key roles in the pic, which already stars Luke Evans and David Oyelowo.
Based on the book by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellstrom, and adapted by Triple Nine scribe Matt Cook and 28 Weeks Later writer Rowan Joffe, Three Seconds centers on a man hung out to dry by the FBI in the middle of a top-secret undercover mission. Despite the killer cast Bathurst is lining up, the movie is still being developed on the indie circuit.
Evans leads as a man inside a prison on the aforementioned mission, who is forced to escape by himself when the FBI abandons ship. He’s a sympathetic good guy, with a loving wife (Munn) and daughter on the outside. Gyllenhaal is playing an FBI operative who has a history with Evans’ character, while Brolin will play her no-nonsense supervisor.
Obviously, there have been some major changes in the adaptation process – for one, the movie is no longer about the Swedish police. Regardless, here’s the book synopsis:
Piet Hoffman, a top-secret operative for the Swedish police, faces his most dangerous assignment yet: after years spent infiltrating the Polish mafia, he’s become a key player in their attempt to take over amphetamine distribution inside Sweden’s prisons. To stop them from succeeding, he will have to go undercover, posing as a prisoner inside the country’s most notorious jail.
But when a botched drug deal involving Hoffman results in the death of another cop, the murder investigation is assigned to the brilliant but haunted Detective Inspector Ewert Grens–a man who never gives up until he’s cracked the case. Grens’s determination to find the killer not only threatens to expose Hoffman’s true identity, it may reveal even bigger crimes at the heart of the Swedish justice system. And there are players who will do anything to stop Grens from discovering the truth.
