Idris Elba is a busy actor with a whole raft of projects filming this year. The latest ready for release is action-packed Bastille Day and takes place in the heart of Paris…
Idris Elba has been a solid presence in action drama for a long while now. It may be nearly two decades since he got a prominent break in UK vampire drama Ultraviolet (he reprised his role in a proposed US remake that only went to pilot) but in that time he’s made a name for himself in acclaimed outings such as Luther, The Wire, Pacific Rim, the Marvel Universe movies as (as Heimdall) and narrowly missed out on an Oscar nomination this year for Beasts of No Nation. The next year will see him in equally diverse projects: the voice of Shere Khan in The Jungle Book, the bad-guy Krall in Star Trek Beyond and taking the role of Roland Deschain in the long -gestating adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower
The next movie we’ll see him in is Bastille Day. The film sees Elba star as Sean Briar, a field agent who finds himself in the middle of a conspiracy when the suspect, Michael Mason (Richard Madden from Game Of Thrones) whom he arrests for a bomb attack turns out to be merely a pawn in a much bigger plan. Can the police-officer and the pick-pocket stay alive long enough to uncover what is going on, who can be trusted and avoid being caught in the crossfire?
The trailer certainly cements the idea that Elba could – and should be – at least on a shortlist for the next James Bond, though he may prefer films that come with less baggage. The only problem we have with this Bastille Day trailer is that it suffers from the modern malady of basically playing out much of the entire film in shorthand – so some of the surprises and misdirections that are likely there in the first half of the film now look to be already spoiled before we get into the multiplex.
However director James Watkins (The Descent Part 2, The Woman in Black) certainly seems to have made the most of Elba. We’ll see the full results when the film hits UK screens in April…
