Erica Bana in talks for Armored

Proof that Hollywood still hasn’t lost its taste for foreign-flavoured remakes, Millennium Films is planning Armored, an Americanised version of 2004’s French heist drama Le Convoyeur. The company wants Eric Bana to star and has lined up Be Cool’s F Gary Gray to direct.

Armored will follow a man who takes a job in Michigan working for a security company as part of an armoured car crew. His co-workers take a shine to him and let him in on their plans to pull of a heist, little suspecting that he has his own motives for nabbing the job.

Bana’s been interested in the lead before, but decided instead to take the role of villain Nero in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot. And now that very project might cost him the job again, reports Variety, since Armored’s April shooting schedule may clash with promoting Trek.

Title Switch?

Chances are Armored won’t actually end up being called that, though, since Nimrod Antal is already shooting an armoured car caper with Matt Dillon and Laurence Fishburne that will arrive next year.

Still, this sounds like a cool project, particularly since it’ll boast a script from Andrew Kevin Walker and David Ayer, which all but guarantees grit and bloody, bloody violence. Plus, F Gary Gray managed to make the Italian Job remake watchable, and proved himself able to handle heist films again with Set It Off.

But with two of Hollywood’s most respected writers working together, couldn’t they have just mined the pair’s collective brain for a cool new idea instead?