Joe Carnahan is another one of those guys who doesn’t quite have the reputation he arguably deserves. Perhaps it is due to the fact that, tough-guy/gal attitudes aside, there is little tonal consistency throughout his filmography. The indie intensity of NARC is miles away from the anarchic, star-studded ACES, THE A-TEAM was a jubilant crowd-pleaser which he followed up with the brutal, unrelenting THE GREY, etc. Now, it seems like his next will have the highest stakes of any film of his career: the fate of the U.S. President.
Carnahan will next direct MOTORCADE for DreamWorks. He’ll be taking a pass at the script, which was previously written by Oscar-nominee Billy Ray (CAPTAIN PHILLIPS, THE HUNGER GAMES, BREACH, and Richard Rush’s semi-legendary gender-bending sex drama COLOR OF NIGHT).
The plot (which admittedly isn’t THAT far removed from the one-two of OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN and WHITE HOUSE DOWN from 2013) involves an attempted kidnapping of POTUS as his titular motorcade treks through Los Angeles. One of his former Secret Service agents (disgraced, of course) has to jump in and save the day.
The project has been in development for years, and has had Tom Cruise and Ryan Reynolds in discussions to play the Secret Service agent, but now that Carnahan’s onboard he’s probably going to have a big say re: casting.
While the resemblance to those 2013 flicks is regrettable, I wasn’t blown away by either, so I think there’s plenty of room to make a terrific, large-scaled “President-in-danger” nail-biter out of this premise. But it’s Carnahan that singlehandedly puts this on my radar. The dude got an unfair shake with STRETCH when Universal dumped the low-budget dark comedy onto VOD last year with precious little promotion, particularly considering how much funnier and more energetic the flick was than the vast majority of that year’s studio comedies. He’s spent much of his time since working on the Katherine Heigl show STATE OF AFFAIRS, which he exec produces, as well as occasionally writing and/or directing episodes. I hope the work is satisfying, but someone of his talent deserves to be playing in a bigger sandbox, and the fun-soaked spectacle of both ACES and THE A-TEAM give me hope that this could have the humor and mayhem so sorely missing from OLYMPUS and WHITE HOUSE DOWN.
The dude certainly has an eye for casting (did you know who Chris Pine or Frank Grillo were before you saw them in his flicks?), so I’m curious who he’ll get to play the Eagle and his former Secret Service agent. Can we hope for a reteam with his lead from THE GREY so we can see Liam Neesons as the Pres?
