Avatar star Stephen Lang is reuniting with director Uli Edel for The Mercy Rider, a modern-day Western thriller that Edel will direct from a screenplay by Richard Julian.
Lang plays Joe McCabe, a former soldier and reclusive Texas rancher who risks everything to challenge immigration authorities after they detain a local father. Determined to reunite the farmer with his family, McCabe confronts Harvey “Hawk” Walters, a hard-line immigration agent played by Irish actor Jack Hudson. Filming is set to take place in Mexico.
G. Mac Brown, a line producer on Last Exit to Brooklyn and an executive producer on Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning The Departed and Neil Burger’s 2017 hit The Upside, will produce The Mercy Rider alongside Hudson.
German-born Edel made his feature debut with the sleeper hit Christiane F. (1981), about a young Berlin heroin addict. His English-language debut came with Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), an adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s novel set in the working-class neighborhoods of Red Hook, Brooklyn, in 1952. The film starred Lang as a shop steward and closeted homosexual alongside Jennifer Jason Leigh as a prostitute searching for love. Although a modest commercial success, it became a breakout film for those involved. Edel later directed the Oscar-nominated The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008).
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