Ex-M-15 Spook Richard Armitage and current MI6 agent Naomie Harris are joining forces for Clearance, an East African-set action-drama that will call on their field skills.
The story has Armitage’s salty mine clearer and his pregnant wife (Harris) being kidnapped in South Sudan. The pair manage to make their escape, only to find themselves forced to navigate a deadly minefield. Presumably this will be without access to all the usual tools of the trade, unless the kidnappers have happily left them lying around. Which would be incompetent kidnapping.
UMedia is shopping the movie around the Cannes film market. “We don’t see many scripts as strong as Clearance: a smart action film, set against an interesting, topical background,” says Peter Rogers, head of the film group. "It’s a tense, thrilling and emotionally hard-hitting story that we think audiences will love.”
Behind the camera is Finnish director Aku Louhimies whose Tolstoy adaptation, Frozen Land, was a festival favourite back in 2005. The Colony screenwriters Richard Campling and Svet Rouskov have done the words-on-paper part of the process for what will be Louhimies’ first English-language feature. Principle photography on Clearance is scheduled to kick off in South Africa in November
Armitage, meanwhile, recently bid farewell to **The Hobbit **franchise and will soon be debuting as Hannibal’s Dolarhyde. Harris has Antoine Fuqua’s boxing drama **Southpaw and the small matter of Spectre ahead.