Tom Hanks officially confirmed for Kathryn Bigelow's TRIPLE FRONTIER

Producer Charles Roven has told Coming Soon that Tom Hanks will lead Kathryn Bigelow's post-Oscar film Triple Frontier, which is gearing up for a mid-March start date. This is Bigelow's €˜Traffic€™ style drugs movie set at the notorious border intersection of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina where the Igazu and Parana rivers converge and crime is impossible to monitor. Presumably Hanks will be a Law Enforcement Agent of some kind as it's kind of difficult to imagine him as a member of a drug cartel. The script is from Mark Boal, and we hear it will have the same €˜raw and visceral visual style€™ as The Hurt Locker. Roven, who refereed to the title as Triple Frontier instead of the more recently rumoured Sleeping Dogs, says; "We're still looking to cast the other roles", so we have to wait and see if Bigelow can attract more of her dream cast that once was said to include Sean Penn, Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, Christian Bale, Will Smith and Denzel Washington. Word is she met with the majority of those a few months back for the two-lead film, but you can probably safely scratch off Bale given he will be making The Dark Knight Rises just weeks later, Depp because he will be re-teaming with Tim Burton for another soulless venture in Dark Shadows and also Penn as presumably he was up for the same role as Hanks. Last night, I spent a few hours catching up with some archive Tom Hanks/Charlie Rose interviews from 2000-2003, and it saddens me a little to look at the body of work the actor was producing at the turn of the century (Cast Away, Catch Me If You Can, Road to Perdition) and to think that we haven't really seen Hanks test himself in a long, long while. I enjoyed him in Charlie Wilson's War but it was a walk in the park role for him compared to his previous films, and obviously his recent voice job in Toy Story 3 didn't require him to do much that just show up on a sound stage. Let's hope this is the start of a new, challenging and interesting body of work.
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Matt Holmes is the co-founder of What Culture, formerly known as Obsessed With Film. He has been blogging about pop culture and entertainment since 2006 and has written over 10,000 articles.