Sylvester Stallone is remaking a South Korean… | Little White Lies

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Sylvester Stal­lone is remak­ing a South Kore­an gang­ster epic

06 May 2019

Words by Charles Bramesco

A man in a black military uniform holds a rifle, standing in a field.
A man in a black military uniform holds a rifle, standing in a field.
The Gang­ster, The Cop, The Dev­il is com­ing to America.

How’s this for a vote of con­fi­dence: South Kore­an genre mas­ter Lee Won-tae’s lat­est film The Gang­ster, The Cop, The Dev­il hasn’t even seen the light of pub­lic day, and already it’s scored a remake deal. The crime epic will debut lat­er this month in the Mid­night sec­tion of the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, but there must be some­thing there, because Hol­ly­wood wants in.

In the wee small hours of this morn­ing, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter ran an item announc­ing that Sylvester Stal­lone would shep­herd Lee’s film to West­ern audi­ences by pro­duc­ing an Eng­lish-lan­guage remake. And though the film will cater to its mar­ket, it won’t lose touch with its Kore­an origins.

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Don Lee (known as Ma Dong-seok back home) has signed on to star in the remake, repris­ing the role he orig­i­nat­ed in the upcom­ing Kore­an film. He por­trays a gang boss bare­ly evad­ing a ser­i­al killer’s attempt­ed attack, who then allies him­self with a local cop to track down the homi­ci­dal mani­ac before he strikes again.

(Shades of I Saw the Dev­il, anoth­er Kore­an killer-thriller slat­ed for Amer­i­can­iza­tion once upon a time, though direc­tor Adam Wingard has back-burnered it while he has his hands full with the ges­tat­ing Godzil­la Vs. Kong.)

With a bit of tim­ing, this could be part of Don Lee’s for­mal intro­duc­tion to State­side view­ers; just a few weeks ago, Mar­vel signed him for a role in their upcom­ing mytho­log­i­cal epic The Eter­nals. Any­one who’s seen his per­for­mance in Train to Busan already knows he’s ready to make the jump to trans-Pacif­ic star.

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