Matt Damon is set to reunite with Ford V Ferrari director James Mangold for the upcoming movie The Force.
The Force is an adaptation of Don Winslow’s bestselling crime novel of the same name and Damon will play Denny Malone, an NYPD detective who runs an elite crime-fighting squad that bends the law so often that the line between good and evil becomes blurred.
The squad also becomes embroiled in a corruption scandal and to stop the city’s racial tensions from escalating into an all-out bloodbath, Malone must reconcile the idealistic guardian he sees in himself with the corrupt cop he has become.
The synopsis according to Deadline further reads:
He is under siege from all sides: Harlem drug gangs, the mob he’s in bed with, the brother cops he’s about to destroy, the mayor’s office who fears what he knows and who he can implicate, the federal investigators who want to put him behind bars. But most of all, he struggles with the Faustian bargain on the table that will require him to testify against his loyal but dirty team, weighing loyalty to them over his own family.
The first draft of the script was written by David Mamet but director James Mangold has been rewriting it with the help of Scott Frank.
Another synopsis of The Force from Amazon reads:
ll Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop. He is “the King of Manhattan North,” a highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of “Da Force.” Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest, an elite special unit given unrestricted authority to wage war on gangs, drugs and guns. Every day and every night for the eighteen years he’s spent on the job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps. He’s done whatever it takes to serve and protect in a city built by ambition and corruption, where no one is clean—including Malone himself.
What only a few know is that Denny Malone is dirty: he and his partners have stolen millions of dollars in drugs and cash in the wake of the biggest heroin bust in the city’s history. Now Malone is caught in a trap and being squeezed by the Feds, and he must walk the thin line between betraying his brothers and partners, the Job, his family, and the woman he loves, trying to survive, body and soul, while the city teeters on the brink of a racial conflagration that could destroy them all.
Based on years of research inside the NYPD, this is the great cop novel of our time and a book only Don Winslow could write: a haunting and heartbreaking story of greed and violence, inequality and race, crime and injustice, retribution and redemption that reveals the seemingly insurmountable tensions between the police and the diverse citizens they serve. A searing portrait of a city and a courageous, heroic, and deeply flawed man who stands at the edge of its abyss, The Force is a masterpiece of urban living full of shocking and surprising twists, leavened by flashes of dark humor, a morally complex and utterly riveting dissection of modern American society and the controversial issues confronting and dividing us today.
Matt Damon is a tested actor whose ability to take on almost role has put him among Hollywood’s most distinguished actors. Starring in a crime drama isn’t something new to him so he should pull it off easily and given his bankability as a star, The Force should also do well at the box office.
