Clive Owen Part of THE KILLER ELITE with Jason Statham

Clive Owen may not have landed the James Bond gig a few years back, but he hasn’t stopped showing his stuff in his growing resume of action films. Director Gary McKendry’s The Killer Elite will add Owen, according to Variety, and join action star Jason Statham. With shooting set to begin next month in Australia, things are moving fast for the film. Additionally, landing these two actors in lead roles is an impressive feat for a director without a feature length film to his credit, so it will be interesting to see how this turns out.

For more on the film, including the roles of both Statham and Owen, hit the jump.

The film is based on Ranulph Fiennes’ novel The Feather Men, which has this description:

“[The Killer Elite] follows a group of former British special forces members being hunted by a team of assassins led by Statham’s character, a former Navy Seal. Owen will take on the role of a senior field operative and member of a clandestine group protecting former special forces soldiers and their families.”

And here’s a more in depth synposis/review by Publisher’s Weekly [via Amazon]:

Founded in England in the late 1960s, the so-called Committee, otherwise known as the Feather Men, was a vigilante group dedicated to solving crimes that the police could not. This absorbing book details their 14-year struggle to capture the Clinic, a band of contract killers who murdered four former British soldiers. The background was this: Amr bin Issa, sheikh of a tribe in Oman, had lost four sons in his country’s civil wars. Although tradition demanded that he avenge their deaths, he did nothing and was deposed as sheikh. Then he arranged with the Clinic to kill the servicemen believed responsible for the deaths of his sons. How the hired killers went about their task (making each murder look like an accident), how they were finally apprehended and how this case in 1990 also put an end to the Committee–or so Fiennes ( Hell on Ice ) contends its members have assured him–makes for a highly suspenseful tale. Readers will be given pause, however, by Fiennes’s wont to romanticize vigilante justice and his assertion that for 20 years the British “have had good reason to be grateful for the Feather Men’s protective presence.”

Financing on the picture will be provided by Omnilab Media and Inferno Entertainment with Michael Boughen, Steven Chasman, and Joni Sighvatsson producing. The film will lens in Melbourne on May 13 until mid-July, before moving to Wales later that month. Neither writer nor release date have been announced yet.