With a shrug and a twitch and a twinkle in his eye, Christopher Walken looks set to join the cast of the action comedy Wild Oats. He'll be joining Christina Ricci, Bill Pullman, Maria Bello, John Corbett and Shirley MacLaine.
No details of who Walken will be playing yet, but we do know that the film stars MacLaine as a widow with some windfall cash, heading for Las Vegas with her granddaughter (Ricci) in tow.
Wild Oats comes to us courtesy of noob team Claudia Myers (writing) and Scott Marshall (directing) so it's tough to call what kind of shape the film will ultimately take. Is this a generation spanning, female version of The Hangover? Or possibly a throwback to one of those large-cast caper films of yore, like Jerry Zucker tried with Rat Race? Action certainly isn't a genre one would associate with MacLaine (well, Shirley at least: John McClane is another matter) but "action villain" is a role we've certainly enjoyed from Walken before. Is that what we're looking at here? Or will he be more on the sidelines, like he was in Man on Fire?
The answers should start arriving later in the year: Wild Oats is scheduled to start filming in Connecticut in August.