Jason Statham joining the espionage film The Killer Elite

Jason Statham is attached to play a former Navy Seal in The Killer Elite, based on the novel The Feather Men by Sir Ranulph Fiennes, according to Empire Magazine.

The deal for the film was closed a few days ago at the Cannes Film Festival and it will be directed by commercials director Gary McKendry. The book, based on true events, tells the story of the assassination of four SAS operatives by a group of independent assassins called The Clinic, who carry out the murders under the orders of a former Shah of Oman who blames the SAS men for his sons’ deaths. The Clinic make the deaths look like accidents, but a group known as the Feather Men, who provide protection and vigilante justice for those who target SAS men and their families, is on the case, and proceed to hunt down those responsible for the SAS killings.

Statham will play a former Navy Seal who’s forced out of retirement to save his closest friend.

Shooting is scheduled to start this fall in London, Paris and Australia for The Killer Elite, which is apparently not based on, or in any way related to the 1975 Sam Peckinpah-directed cult action classic of the same name, which starred James Caan, Robert Duvall and Mako. That film was based on a book by Robert Rostand titled Monkey in the Middle.