Todd Phillips got the ball rolling on his planned film Arms & The Dudes with his erstwhile **Hangover **star Bradley Cooper producing. But now he has a cast lined up as well, with the news this morning that Jesse Eisenberg and Shia LaBeouf are in talks to head up the comedy thriller.
The film is based on an article for Guy Lawson wrote for Rolling Stone in 2011. The stranger-than-fiction premise involves two Miami slackers, David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli, who penetrated the "grey world" of international arms dealing and ended up with the Pentagon as a client. But a $300m contract to supply arms to the US' allies in Afghanistan soon sent them seriously out of their depth in a very dangerous world.
Eisenberg and LaBeouf seem like an intriguing pairing for the film, although it remains to be seen whether LaBeouf has yet put aside his recent bizarre antics.
Phillips has been re-writing the screenplay since May, and had hoped to be in production later this year. He's cutting it a bit fine for that, but with casting underway, the shoot can't be far off.