You could throw a stone in Hollywood right now and hit a Navy SEAL. Not that you’d want to, we imagine — a bullet would go between your eyes before the rock hit the ground. But the execution of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden at the hand of SEAL Team 6 has made the Navy badasses the go-to choice of Hollywood leads all of a sudden, with “Call of Duty“-esque propaganda movie “Act of Valor” hitting in February, with Kathryn Bigelow‘s story of the figures who tracked down Bin Laden eyeing a release at the end of next year.
But the latter, a reunion with “The Hurt Locker” writer Mark Boal, which has been in the works since even before Bin Laden’s death, now has a rival. Screen Daily announced that “Code Name Geronimo,” — not, as it might sound, a belated sequel to Cedric the Entertainer vehicle “Code Name: The Cleaner” but an actioner based on the mission to kill the legendary terrorist — is moving ahead at Voltage (who, coincidentally or not, were also behind Bigelow’s Oscar-winning war flick), and the project has a director who, well, doesn’t quite have the cachet of Ms. Bigelow.
Director John Stockwell, who’s been behind forgettable B-movies like “Blue Crush,” “Turistas,” “Into The Blue” and the upcoming Halle Berry vs. sharks picture “Dark Tide,” has come on board to direct the project, with a script by newcomer Kendall Lampkin, who doesn’t have any credits to his name, but does, according to his Twitter account, think the trailer for “A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas” is the funniest ever. Take that as you will.
This seems like the kind of cheap, cash-in project that we expected in the wake of Bin Laden’s death; it’s only surprising that it’s taken this long. But in fairness, Bigelow was coming off a half-decade without a movie in theaters before “The Hurt Locker,” so that didn’t necessarily look any more promising on paper. OK, it totally did. Filming is set to begin in January 2012, and, with Bigelow still lacking a cast for her project, it’s possible that “Code Name Geronimo” could beat her effort into theaters. Should it make it into theaters.
