Sean Penn is now looking at joining Christian Bale in the drama The Last Photograph. The film, said to be in the vein of The Searchers and Taken, is based off an original idea by Zack Snyder about a war correspondent in Afghanistan who is the sole survivor of an attack on Americans. Deadline reports that Bale is set to play the journalist, while Penn is circling the role of an ex-special ops soldier who enlists Bale’s help to find a missing family member who has been kidnapped. In exchange, Bale’s character gets the story.Snyder’s 300 co-writer Kurt Johnstad penned the script, and Niels Arden Oplev (the Swedish version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) is set to direct. The film was set up at Warner Bros. but apparently negotiations are ongoing to move the film to Dark Castle, where Joel Silver and Andrew Rona would come aboard as producers. The report states that Penn is very interested in joining the project, having just turned down roles in the Superman flick Man of Steel (the villain, perhaps?) and Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad. Plans are to shoot The Last Photograph in 2012 after Bale wraps The Dark Knight Rises.