With Bezucha in, Who’s Too Cool to Play ‘Train’?

The Family Stone helmer Thomas Bezucha is set to tackle the English remake of supreme French auteur Patrice Leconte’s drama Man on the Train for Miramax Films. The original film (L’Homme du
Train), a tale of a drifter casing a small town for a bank robbery, who befriends an elderly professor to aid him in this crime will be adapted by writer Daniel Taplitz (“Chaos Theory”) and produced by Bob Cooper (The Crusaders).
Problem is, actors are circling over this film; I would say “like vultures” but nobody seems that interested in this corpse. Almost no one is biting! I guess Billy Bob
Thornton isn’t really “nobody” but the poor guy seems like he fell off the face of the planet, right?

While I envision John C. Reilly playing the bumbling, rebel wannabe, I’m more conflicted on who should play the blagger. While this isn’t a buddy film per se, the actors do need to riff off each other considering their respective self-loathing and how they covet each other’s lives.
Who should play him? Jean Reno of “Leon (The Professional)”? Jason Statham of “The Bank Job”? Somehow I’m seeing an international lead for this role. John C. Reilly is great in everything, and though I hate to see him in another supporting role, but he’d be a great foil against someone like Jean Reno. Or Peter Stormare, even.
If Jean Reno and Peter Stormare (“Premonition”) were tackling each other, under the right circumstances, that might work beautifully. The characters are similar and I think the key to making a film like this work is understanding how, even though one man is a gangster and one is a teacher, they actually have more in common than they think. Playing opposites against each other is the obvious choice, but if circumstance lies between these two men’s destinies, wouldn’t similar actors be just a tad more interesting?

The above mentioned names would significantly bring the year of birth down for the paired bank robbers. The 2002 original saw  leather jacket wearing, French-rocker Johnny Hallyday play the rebel role, and Jean Rochefort (the senoir citizen who couldn’t do more than a couple of hours worth on a horse in Terry Gilliam’s attempt at Don Q in the docu project Lost in La Mancha) played the wanna be gunslinger.