It looks like we’re getting a sort-of sequel to the 2004 movie Layer Cake, which helped turn Daniel Craig into a bona fide movie star. It’s only sort-of, as while it’s based on the JJ Connolly’s sequel novel, it seems a whole new filmmaking team will take on the tale, according to Deadline.
Jason Statham and his producing partner Steve Chasman have acquired the rights to Connolly’s 2011 novel, Viva la Madness!. Statham is also set to play the same nameless protagonist that Daniel Craig played in Layer Cake.
Here’s the description on the novel, ‘From the many levels of the London underworld portrayed in Layer Cake, Viva La Madness! moves to international crime with trans-Atlantic drug deals, money laundering and high-tech electronic fraud, portrayed with the same uncanny believability. The anonymous hero of Layer Cake is pulled back into the drug game before he can escape to a sunny retirement: in an authentic but dazzling combination of London low-life, Caribbean high-life and Venezuelan drug cartels toting machine-guns in Mayfair. The brilliance and the madness is back: ‘Viva la madness!”
As he did with Layer Cake, JJ Connolly will write the screenplay. There’s no news on when it might shoot.