I don’t know about you, but the pitch for a film about “a crime-overwhelmed America that has one day a year where anything goes” sound like the result of studio intern coming up with loglines via a Burroughsian cut-up technique pulling from chopped up backs of VHS cases for John Carpenter movies and an old Girls Gone Wild tape.
Instead, that’s Deadline’s description of James DeMonaco’s new thriller that star’s Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey (Game of Thrones, Dredd). The film is finished and now set to be released by Universal on May 31st of next year. Hawke’s story begins as the day of anarchy spills over the gates of his isolated home and drags him into an “urban nightmare.” Since anything –murder, robbery, assault, possessing marijuana– is legal, I assume shit gets ruhl.
DeMonaco is responsible for screenplays of thrillers like The Negotiator and the Carpenter remake Assault on Precint 13, as well as the high-concept 90s dramedy Jack (which did had FFC behind it, of all people). More lately he was involved in the short-lived TV version of Crash.
Frankly, I do like the sound of a thriller about a society in which an annual day of anarchy is determined to be the solution to some problem or another- I have to assume this is the universe in which Japan offs school kids every year, creating the model for when the world dissolves into districts that send tributes to die in a similar Battle Royale ever year…