Leonardo DiCaprio is one of those actors that just keeps getting better and better with each outing. He’s gone from annoying little teen magazine cover boy, to honestly one of the very best actors in the industry today. The scary thing is he still has a lot of films left in him, and I’m getting curious to see exactly how good he’ll get.
Always on the lookout for scripts that (when combined with his considerable talent) have the potential to gain him some Oscar consideration, it look like he may have found his next role as a Cocaine transporter in Cocaine Cowboys. The good folks over at Cinematical give us this:
Mid-strike, filmmaker Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg signed on for Cocaine Cowboys, a feature adaptation of that cocaine trafficking documentary that came out back in 2006. Mr. Wahlberg was set to play Jon Roberts, a Miami drug dealer who distributed billions of dollars worth of cocaine. Now Page Six says that he’ll be joined by Departed co-star Leonardo DiCaprio for all of the retro drug shenanigans. A movie insider told the site that this film “will blow Blow out of the water,” and that Leo “is excited about the opportunity to play the airplane pilot who travels with Mark’s character to obtain kilos of cocaine from Pablo Escobar.”
I like the idea for this movie… I even like the idea of seeing DiCaprio and Wahlberg on screen together again. The only thing that gives me a bit of pause is that the original documentary seemed to have been a celebration of the drug trade as opposed to a documentary of it in Miami. Therefore, my only concern is that this narrative version will try to make these characters (who profited on the blood, suffering and addiction of others) out to be cinematic heroes. I have nothing to suggest they’ll actually do that, but it is a worry of mine.
That aside, the project looks like a winner to me. Maybe they should see if they can get Martin Sheen in there too just for good measure.
