Jake Gyllenhaal, Ansel Elgort, Zendaya to star in ‘Finest Kind’

Jake Gyllenhaal. Image: AFP/Geoff Robins via AFP Relaxnews

Three Hollywood stars have stepped on board a crime thriller from the writer of “L.A. Confidential” and “Mystic River”.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Ansel Elgort star as two half-brothers in the underworld thriller “Finest Kind”.

Getting back in touch after spending their childhoods apart, one of the siblings discovers that his father has only a few months left to live.

At the same time, he gets involved with a crime syndicate, setting up a dangerous conflict between the two brothers and a Boston-based organized crime syndicate.

Brian Helgeland is installed as both writer and director, repeating the sort of double-duty role he performed on five previous films.

That quintet started with 1999’s Mel Gibson and Lucy Liu revenge thriller “Payback” and continued with two Heath Ledger projects (medieval adventure “A Knight’s Tale” and monastic mystery “The Order”), Jackie Robinson baseball biopic “42” and the Tom Hardy Kray twins movie “Legend”.

Of those, “42” brought the greatest amount of critical acclaim, mostly focused upon Chadwick Boseman’s breakout performance in the title role, as well as the biggest domestic box office; “The Order” proved the least successful both critically and commercially, while early successes “Payback” and “A Knight’s Tale” both cleared $100 million internationally.

But none compare to the measure of acclaim visited upon Helgeland’s two outstanding victories as a writer of tense crime dramas, having adapted 1997’s “L.A. Confidential” for which he won an Oscar, and 2003’s Oscar nominee “Mystic River”.

As for his three “Finest Kind” stars, Jake Gyllenhaal led “Donnie Darko”, “Nightcrawler” and shared top billing with Heath Ledger in “Brokeback Mountain”, while the younger Ansel Elgort has been paired with Shailene Woodley in both “The Fault in Our Stars” and the “Divergent” trilogy before further establishing himself in 2017’s kinetic, soundtrack-oriented heist movie “Baby Driver”.

Zendaya Coleman came up through the Disney Channel’s “Shake It Up” and “K.C. Undercover”, and in 2017 played a key role in “The Greatest Showman” and shone in “Spider-Man: Homecoming”.

The casting news was made as production company STX Entertainment prepares to bring “Finest Kind” to the European Film Market which runs Feb. 15 to 23 alongside the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival. JB

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