Writer-director Shane Black has another action thriller lined up – The Executioner, based on a long-running series of pulp novels by Don Pendleton. Months after the release of his latest film, Play Dirty, veteran writer-director Shane Black is back in pulp thriller territory with The Executioner. Just as Play Dirty was based on the Parker ... Shane Black making a new pulp thriller, The Executioner
Writer-director Shane Black has another action thriller lined up – The Executioner, based on a long-running series of pulp novels by Don Pendleton.
Months after the release of his latest film, Play Dirty, veteran writer-director Shane Black is back in pulp thriller territory with The Executioner.
Just as Play Dirty was based on the Parker novels (by Donald E Westlake), The Executioner picks up a long-running string of novels by Don Pendleton. If all goes well, it’ll bring the books’ hero, Mack Bolan, to the screen for the first time.
The project will also see Black re-team with his old producer partner Joel Silver – their history goes all the way back to Black’s screenwriting debut, 1987’s cop thriller, Lethal Weapon. They’ve collaborated multiple times since, most recently on Play Dirty – though Silver left that production under somewhat unclear circumstances.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, Black and Silver have The Executioner set up at Sony Pictures, where Black will co-write with Anthony Bagarozzi and Charles Mondry and potentially direct.
There were a startling 464 novels written in the Executioner series, published from 1969 onwards, all of them following the exploits of Bolan – an ex-soldier and sharp-shooter who spent his long career fighting crime organisations and terrorists. This means there’s a vast sea of adventures for Black to choose from, all with colourful titles like Cambodia Clash, Hollywood Hell and Missouri Deathwatch.
Other filmmakers have tried to adapt the series into a movie in the past; William Friedkin had a go, and there was talk at one stage of Bradley Cooper playing the character.
Black’s movies have long been steeped in the laconic heroes and dark humour of pulp thrillers, from his early work as a screenwriter to the films he directed himself – Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and The Nice Guys are classic examples of his mix of action and desert-dry humour. He brought a big dash of it to Iron Man 3 (which this writer really liked), but seemed somewhat unsteady on his feet with The Predator, which we’ve written about at length on these pages.
Play Dirty was a return to more familiar territory, with Black giving the career criminal, Parker, a revenge adventure filled with chaos and pithy one-liners. Sneaking onto Prime Video earlier this year, it was a fun thriller, though hampered somewhat by a stilted lead performance from Mark Wahlberg; it’s a pity we never got a version of the film starring Black’s regular collaborator, Robert Downey Jr.
It’s always good to see Black up to his antics, though, so we’ll bring you more on The Executioner as it comes in.
