The last time he filmed the story of a man dealing with events spiralling out of control, director John Moore made A Good Day To Die Hard. But Africa-set action drama **The Englishman promises to be something very different from Bruce Willis running around Russia kvetching at Russians.
Terminator 2’s William Wisher has adapted the script from former SAS soldier Will Scully’s book Once A Pilgrim: The True Story Of One Man’s Courage Under Rebel Fire. That's not an unauthorized biography of a TIE Fighter pilot but the story of Scully’s efforts to help the hopeless during a military coup in Sierra Leone.
Scully, along with his former regiment the “Pilgrims,” evacuated civilians as the conflict raged around him. “The Englishman is one of those rare stories, the details and circumstance of which are so bizarre and mesmerizing, it created a compulsion in us to tell it,” Moore says in a statement picked up by Variety.
There’s certainly scope for a good drama here, though we worry about comparisons to such valiant yet vaguely unsatisfying stories like Machine Gun Preacher. Foresight Unlimited and Envision Entertainment are drumming up the cash to get the film made, a fact that should be helped once the companies and their anointed filmmaker start lining up a cast.