Ken Watanabe has proven to be an impressive mainstay since his breakout Hollywood role in The Last Samurai, a performance I championed as my pick for Supporting Actor Oscar back in 2004. Now it seems he will be joining John Cusack and Gong Li in the Mikael Hafstrom period drama Shanghai with a script by Hossein Amini.
The film is set four months prior to Dec. 7, 1941, follows an American who returns to a corrupt, Japan-occupied Shanghai to discover his friend has been killed. While trying to solve the murder, he falls in love and discovers a much larger secret that his own government is hiding.
Hafstrom recently directed the hit thriller 1408, which starred Cusack, and previous to that the lackluster thriller Derailed. As for Amini’s scripting talents there isn’t a lot to go on considering his most notable release was the awful Four Feathers followed by the yet-to-be released Killshot, which is due out later this year. IMDb has him down to pen the script for the second part of the “His Dark Materials” franchise, The Subtle Knife, following up last year’s Golden Compass, but that is the first I have heard of that and I am not even sure if that sequel is going to be moving forward.
Shanghai will be shot, appropriately, in Shanghai and will be distributed by The Weinstein Co.
