According to Crimespree Cinema, Jason Statham has signed on as Detective Sergeant Tom Brant, for the film of Ken Bruen's hard-boiled London crime novel The Blitz.
In book form, The Blitz is the third Brant novel (franchise!) by the Irish author, and involves a serial killer working his way through Britain's police departments. The screenplay is by Moon's Nathan Parker, and the director is Elliott Lester (little-seen love-triangle thriller Love is the Drug), with shooting scheduled to start next month.
Statham's character is an oldschool un-PC copper, in trouble for assaulting a police psychiatrist, and deeply homophobic, which causes problems when he's partnered with Paddy Considine's openly gay Sergeant Porter Nash.
Now on the surface, that immediately calls to mind the woeful 1990 Heart Condition, where Bob Hoskins played a racist cop in an uneasy partnership with Denzel Washington.
Hopefully though, that similarity will remain superficial, although its still hard to see how this will transcend the partners-who-initially-dislike-each-other-but-find-mutual-respect-by-the-closing-credits cliche.
But Considine's presence indicates quality, and it could be a role for Statham to stretch his acting muscles: a dramatic project more akin to The Bank Job and **London **than his action franchises. A British Seven?
Whatever, a certain level of guilty pleasure is at least practically guaranteed: nobody does "annoyed" quite as well as The Stath.