According to Variety, Keanu Reeves is in talks to star in James Wan's reimagining of "The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil" at Paramount Pictures, a remake of the 2019 Korean action thriller. Don Lee, better known as Ma Dong-seok, is attached to reprise his role opposite Reeves.
The 2019 original is a small Korean film about a cop and a gangster forced to work together to catch a serial killer, and it premiered at Cannes and the room got weirdly excited. The remake has assembled a producer bench that reads like a studio org chart with a stunt budget: Wan, Michael Clear, Jason Blum, Lee himself, Sylvester Stallone, and Lorenzo di Bonaventura. That is what a movie looks like when the goal is not a film, it is a franchise from the first trailer.
Stallone is attached through his production company to a gangster movie he is not in, which is the most Stallone thing there is. Jason Blum's name is on it, so the budget math is already doing the thing. And Keanu, the actual screen record: thirty years of playing the guy who absorbs the violence, from Matrix to John Wick to everything in between. A gangster is just the same character in a different coat. He has the one qualification a crime remake needs, which is that the audience forgives any plot as long as he looks like he has been awake for seventy-two hours.
Wan is a horror director, which is the correct read of the pitch. Everyone walks a little too straight, the lights are wrong on purpose, and the serial killer gets more screen time than he needs. Don Lee is the engine and he is staying. Reeves is the wing. Wan is the coat. By the time this hits a screen the movie will be less a remake of a Korean thriller and more a meeting where five people with different jobs agreed on the word gangster.
YOUR TURN: When James Wan, Jason Blum, and Sylvester Stallone are all in the credits, what is the actual movie?
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