Way back in 2012, Oldboy director Park Chan-wook became attached to do a Western, which was pretty cool in and of itself. Originally titled The Brigands of Rattleborge, it featured a script by Bone Tomahawk and Brawl in Cell Block 99 writer/director S. Craig Zahler, before he became known for those ultra-violent cult classics. Matthew McConaughey boarded the retitled Brigands Of Rattlecreek, but it failed to find a permanent home both at Warner Bros. and later at Amazon, who likely found it a tough sell. It never went anywhere, but potential like that doesn’t just disappear, and now with an A-list cast aboard, it’s red-hot all over again.
Deadline reports that Park has added Pedro Pascal, Austin Butler, and Tang Wei to the cast alongside McConaughey, who clearly isn’t going anywhere after all of these years. The story centers on a local sheriff and a doctor who team up to get revenge against outlaws who are using the cover of a torrential rainstorm to terrorize a small town and murder its residents. McConaughey had been expected to play the doctor role, but the new report doesn’t make that clear. Perhaps things have changed?
McConaughey, Pascal, and Butler is enough celebrity firepower to get just about any project moving again. Tang Wei is less known, but the Chinese actress has been terrific in a lot of films, including Park’s acclaimed Decision to Leave in 2022.
I can scarcely think of a better pairing than Park, whose specialty is hyper-violent, tightly wound, darkly comedic stories of revenge, with Zahler whose vicious screenplays hit you like blunt force trauma to the head. With this new casting, The Brigands of Rattlecreek is almost too good to be true.
