The Martin Campbell adaptation is based on Stephen Leather’s The Chinaman
Deadline is reporting that Casino Royale, Edge of Darkness and Green Lantern director Martin Campbell is in talks to direct Jackie Chan in the previously-titled The Foreigner for STX Entertainment. The film, an adaptation of Stephen Leather’s novel “The Chinaman,” is scheduled to start filming in the fall. The book is described as follows:
Jungle-skilled, silent and lethal, Nguyen Ngoc Minh had killed for the Viet Cong and then for the Americans. Imprisoned and tortured after the Communist victory, he escaped with his wife and baby daughter to Hong Kong – but only after being forced to watch Thai pirates rape and kill his two eldest daughters.
Now the proud owner of the Double Happiness Chinese takeaway in South London, he watches his daughter grow into a beautiful young woman, secure in the knowledge that the horrors of his homeland are finally behind him.
Until the day an IRA bomb in a Knightsbridge store snatches his family from him in a horrific maelstrom of fire and glass.
Then, simply but persistently, he began to ask the authorities who were the men responsible, what was being done. And was turned away, fobbed off, treated as a nuisance.
Which was when the Chinaman, denied justice, decided on revenge. And went back to war.
The book was adapted by David Marconi and Peter Buchman. Wayne Godfrey is producing.
