First Look at Sean Penn and Josh Brolin in GANGSTER SQUAD; Director Ruben Fleischer Reveals Story Details
by Adam Chitwood Posted: December 9th, 2011 at 9:42 am
One of my most anticipated films of 2012 is director Ruben Fleischer’s (Zombieland) 1940s crime thriller Gangster Squad, and today a pretty cool image has surfaced: stars Sean Penn and Josh Brolin squaring off. Penn plays gangster Mickey Cohen, and the film centers on the Los Angeles task force assembled to bring him to justice. Brolin plays the head of the so-called “Gangster Squad”, surrounded by an impressive ensemble that includes Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Nick Nolte, Michael Peña, Anthony Mackie, and Giovanni Ribisi.
Fleischer recently spoke at length about the project, and you can see what he had to say along with the new image after the jump. Gangster Squad opens October 19th, 2012.
In an interview with EW, Fleischer revealed the basic premise for the flick:
“O’Mara (Josh Brolin), our lead character, has just come back from fighting the Nazis with all these ideals after seeing America at its greatest. And he’s come home and there’s a gangster running his city. While he was gone, Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) took over and he turned the streets of L.A. into a battle zone. In our story, O’ Mara takes the lead of the Gangster Squad, a vigilante police force that fights the gangsters on their own terms, and the battle between them is for the future of Los Angeles: whether it’s going to become corrupt and run by this bunch of gangsters or these guys who fought for these values and want L.A. to be the shining beacon on the west coast that it was always intended to be.”
The director also spoke a bit about Gosling’s character, who’s a little more rough around the edges than Brolin:
“Ryan’s character also went to war, but when he came back, he was a little disillusioned. So he’s more on the fence, hanging out in nightclubs and hanging out with guys who might be gangsters. He’s less clear on where he stands in terms of standing up against Mickey Cohen. But he finds himself in a love triangle with Cohen and Emma Stone’s femme fatale character.”
If the cast and behind-the-scenes talent wasn’t enough, the interactions between these characters sounds pretty engrossing. It’s Fleischer’s first stab at a big-budget studio picture, so I’m hoping the finished film turns out to be as great this all sounds.
Here’s the new image:
9 Comments
Anonymous Comments: (9 Responses)
Praying this is gonna be good. sounds like a great story and a terrifc cast. Plus i wanna see what Fleischer to do with serious material.
“The interactions between these characters sounds pretty engrossing.”
Does it really? Penn is the charismatic, corrupt gangster, Brolin is the idealistic cop, Gosling is the pragmatist struggling to regain his values and Stone is the femme fatale torn between two very different men. It sounds fun and light, but hardly “engrossing.” Once again, Collider continues to be the unofficial Ruben Fleischer fan-site.
Yo chubby, get back to film school and leave the comments to real men. I was engrossed just by the premise, I still am!
Firstly, is that actually meant to be an insult?
Secondly, you were actually engrossed by a premise? I guess it’s true: simple minds are easily entertained.
The images really turn me off, everything looks fake and caricatured. Still, after Streetkings/TrainingDay and so on, this mix is starting to grow on me.
they should had cast amber heard as femme fatale, not emma.
I like 40s crime films as much as anybody and I will go to see this in the theaters, but when is Hollywood going to give us what they’ve been promising for years- a badass, epic, hard-r film about the biggest and baddest gangster ever to have lived, Pablo Escobar? Come on, it could be the best gangster film since City of God.
With a cast as incredible as that the script HAS to be good.