Michael Pena, last seen buried under a building with Nicolas Cage in World Trade Center, has dug himself out and signed on for a role opposite Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep in Lions For Lambs, the Robert Redford-directed war drama set in Afghanistan.
The multi-stranded story will see Pena play an Army ranger, one of a pair of US soldiers wounded and in enemy territory in Afghanistan. His plight is apparently a catalyst to the rest of the plot, which also features Cruise as a US congressman who interacts with Streep's journalist (we're not sure in what way, but don't bet against some sort of political awakening to the reality of war. Or something.) and Redford as an idealistic professor seeking to inspire a privileged student. One of the two soldiers is also a former student of Redford's, but whether that's Pena or not we, er, don't know yet. Bit of a theme developing here, really.
If you'll forgive a bit of speculation for a moment, this may mark a departure of sorts for the Cruiser. Redford's a well-known Hollywood liberal, unlikely to be making a yay-war film, which means that this is likely to be implicitly or explicitly condemnatory of US military policy abroad. If that's the case, it will be something of a departure for Cruise since, with the possible exception of Born on the Fourth of July, he has never really made a political film (subtexts aside). A new dawn for the world's biggest star? Well, maybe - we'll have to wait for release to be sure.
You'd be forgiven for thinking that, with three overlapping storylines set in different parts of the world, that this was all written by **Babel and 21 Grams' **Guillermo Arriaga, but you'd be wrong. It was in fact the work of so-hot-right-now screenwriter Matthew Michael Carnahan, whose other credits include the Jamie Foxx drama The Kingdom, the US version of State of Play and upcoming Ellroy adaptation White Jazz.