Mere seconds (OK, days) after it was announced that he'd be playing a wrestler in, er, The Wrestler, it's been announced that Nicolas Cage is also planning to search for someone who's vanished in, er, The Vanished.
Cage's character is a father who goes searching for his college-aged son, "American born Muslim son" who's missing overseas. We're thinking that the use of that phrase above means that this is, in essence, the story of someone not a million miles from John Walker Lindh, the American college student who went to live in Afghanistan and fight alongside the Taliban.
The film marks the English-language directorial debut of Hany Abu-Assad, the Palestinian-born director of last year's really rather good Paradise Now. It's set to shoot in April, as soon as Cage finishes The Wrestler for Darren Aronofsky (it now looks like he may direct as well as producing, although that's yet to be confirmed) and just before the strike starts in June.
So, good idea or bad idea? If the plot is indeed about a Lindh-type figure, this could be a sort of mirror to Paul Haggis' In The Valley of Elah, but does this sound like the right step for Cage - and for Abu-Assad? And isn't there a danger that people will confuse it with The Vanishing, The Forgotten or Vanishing Point?