Bale, Wahlberg and Singer…OH MY!!!

The Hollywood Reporter’s Risky Biz Blog, has the scoop that Batman/Batemen/John Connor himself, Christian Bale, is in serious talks to star along side Mark Wahlberg in Prisoners.

The script for Prisoners is burning up drooling studios right now and with the addition of these two bad-ass actors, shit is about to explode. The story breaks down like this…”A 6-year-old daughter and her friend are kidnapped, a small-town carpenter butts heads with a young, brash detective in charge of the investigation.  The father is a Bible-reading, deer-hunting survivalist. The cop, meanwhile, can’t wait to get to the city. Feeling failed by the law, the father captures the man he believes responsible and begins to torture him in a desperate attempt to find out what he did with the girls, whom he’s convinced are still alive.”

Sounds pretty intense, and who better to have go at it in an intense thriller than Bale and Wahlberg? What makes this project even more potentially ridiculous, is that thriller-director-extraordinaire Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, X-Men 1 & 2, Valkyrie) has expressed serious interest in directing the movie. Though he may receive serious fanboy bashing for his interpretation of  Superman in Superman Returns, this is one of the elite directors working today, and this script sounds perfectly suited to his style.

Needless to say, this project has endless upside, but nothing is official yet. All of these Hollywood big shots are just in the talking stage of the movie process, but the fact that this confirmed information exists is pretty good news.

Right now, despite his on-set freak out, Christian Bale has the best career in Hollywood. He just finished being Batman for the second time in The Dark Knight; a movie that broke nearly every box-office record, grossed over $1 billion and was nominated for 8 Oscars. In one month, he’ll be starring as resistance leader John Connor in Terminator Salvation, which looks absolutely bad-ass from all the footage I’ve seen. Then, a month after that, he’ll be starring opposite Johnny Depp in the gangster crime-thriller Public Enemies, directed by crime-thriller-extraordinaire Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral). Now he could possibly be starring in Prisoners, which would officially launch him into the Top 5 most-sought after movie stars in Hollywood.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Marky-Mark needs this type of high-caliber, high-quality movie. Although he was brilliant and nominated for an Oscar in 2006 for The Departed, his last couple films have been train-wrecks. M. Night Shyamalan ruined the potential awesomeness of The Happening premise by making trees the culprit of mass suicide, which unfortunately starred Wahlberg. Then, this past summer, only a couple weeks after TDK was unleashed, Marky-Mark starred in the atrocious box-office and critical A-bomb, Max Payne. What’s ironic and funny about that flick is Wahlberg actually publicly bashed TDK, specifically Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker, calling his performance in Max Payne “10 times more intense and bad-ass than The Joker.” Yeah right. How did that work out for ya Mark? So this would be a nice career/ego booster for Wahlberg if all this pans out for the best. All in all, it is looking good and stay tuned to Movie Mash for more updates.

What Do You Think? Discuss.