Neil Marshall to Direct The Professionals

Posted by on April 23rd, 2010   Filed under: Action, International, TV
Source: Empire

neilmarshallprofessionals

With so many team-oriented action movies coming out this year (The Losers, The A-Team, The Expendables), I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there is now another one on the way. Director Neil Marshall (The Descent, Doomsday) recently revealed to Empire Magazine that his next project would be an adaptation of a British TV series from the late ’70s called The Professionals. The story revolves around three agents working for an anti-terrorist organization called CI5 who use somewhat controversial tactics to thwart criminals. If you think it sounds a bit like the British version of The A-Team, here’s an interesting piece of trivia: the show was originally supposed to be called The A-Squad.

Even though I’m not familiar with the original series, the fact that Neil Marshall is directing definitely has my interest piqued. He promises a “real wham-bam rip-roaring adventure movie” and also a “really great buddy movie.” Considering how many different genres Marshall has been able to hop between thus far, I’m interested to see what he can do with this material. His new movie Centurion hits theatres in the U.K. this weekend, and he also has the 3-D horror movie Burst in development with producer Sam Raimi. Any fans of The Professionals out there? Is Neil Marshall the right man to bring this to the big screen?



  • Cwoodward

    As a kid I was a big fan of The Professionals, and I have them on DVD now. I’m not sure how a new movie version would fare, because it seems to a be a product of its time. The Professionals was mostly successful because of the banter between Collins and Shaw. It also had quite a fascist view of law enforcement which I’m not sure works today.

    But what do I know?

  • Cwoodward

    The ‘A-Team’ has distinctive characters with certain traits and different actors can play them and it can still be called ‘The A-Team’. However, the characters in The Professionals (all three of them) don’t really have anything distinctive about them, except that they were Lewis Collins and Martin Shaw. Once you remove them, it’s not ‘The Professionals’ anymore.

  • Mike

    meh, if natalie portman’s not in it, i’m not interested.

  • The Professionals was perhaps closer to Starsky & Hutch than the A-Team. Marshall is angling for Michael Fassbinder as Doyle (the slightly more serious, sensible one, ie Hutch), and Eric Bana as Bodie (originally played as a real 70s smoothie – smarmy – womaniser. A wisecraking Starsky type). Could be good.