Brooke Bunny
Bruce Willis will headline the film adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s “Bandits”, according to Deadline.
The ensemble drama, scripted by “Magic City” and “Rock the Kasbah” writer Mitch Glazer, will produced by Willis’ regular cohorts Randall Emmett and George Furla.
Willis first optioned the book in 1987, but when the rights lapsed Quentin Tarantino swooped in and acquired the rights (as well as three others, including “Rum Punch” which he turned into the film “Jackie Brown”). Tarantino ultimately let the rights go.
The tale is a black comedy that is set in New Orleans and Willis will play Jack Delaney, an ex-con who is struggling to stay on the straight path as he dresses up corpses as a mortician in his brother’s funeral home. Things get much more exciting for him when he meets a gorgeous lapsed nun who is just back from Nicaragua where she took care of lepers and tried to keep the contras from hacking them up with machetes. She wants to smuggle a beautiful young Nicaraguan woman – who contracted leprosy–because the woman’s ex-lover, a Somoza-type colonel, wants to kill her for possibly infecting him. That same guy is raising millions from rich Americans to take back to the contras and the bored mortician finds his own cause, stiffing the colonel and getting away with a fortune with the help of the nun and an ex-cop.
Considering Willis already has a movie called “Bandits” on his filmography, expect the producers to pick a new title for the film.
