It’s the Hollywood circle of life: one of the greatest working filmmakers can’t keep it together on set, you’re brought in to complete her production after she’s ousted, it flops, you lick your wounds and release an action potboiler later that same year, the critics roast it but the picture makes a beautiful dollar anyway, you proceed to GO to collect your next, even more handsomely budgeted project.

Okay, that doesn’t happen to everyone, but that’s the story of director Gavin O’Connor, who took over for Lynne Ramsay after she departed Jane Got a Gun and then directed The Accountant (Ben Affleck played an autistic assassin, remember way back last month?) in 2016. Deadline reports that he’s now taken on the WWII drama Atlantic Wall as his follow-up, with Bradley Cooper attached to star.

The fictitious film trains its crosshairs on a single American paratrooper behind enemy lines. The D-Day invasion has been set, and he’s only got a few hours before all hell breaks loose to complete a two-pronged mission: he’s got to deliver intelligence that could shift the tide of battle in the impending mission, and while he’s at it, he’ll have to protect the son of one of his fallen brothers-in-arms. From the sound of it, the project will combine the same military excitement that last turned Cooper vehicle American Sniper into a hit with a bit of pathos for good measure.

Slap some fatigues on Bradley Cooper, rub some dirt on his face, make sure the word “valor” is somewhere in the tagline and voila! instant blockbuster. Or at least, that’s what the folks at production company Imperative Entertainment are assuming. They’re probably not wrong, too.

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