Gangster Squad
Directed by Ruben Fleischer
Written by Will Beall
Starring: Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Nick Nolte, Emma Stone, Sean Penn, Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi, Michael Peña
Warner Bros. Pictures
Rated R | 113 Minutes
Release Date: January 11, 2013

No Names. No Badges. No Mercy.

Based on Tales from the Gangster Squad by Paul Lieberman, Gangster Squad is the latest film by director Ruben Fleischer (Zombieland).

This neo-noir gangster picture, written for the screen by Will Beall, feels a little like The Dirty Dozen and a lot like Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire, a video game heavily inspired by Curtis Hanson’s impeccable 1997 film, L.A. Confidential.

Fleischer’s film stars Josh Brolin and Ryan Gosling as members of a secret police unit that wages an anything-goes war against notorious mobster Mickey Cohen (Sean Penn) and the corruption that plagues the City of Angels.

Penn portrays the legendary Brooklyn-born Jewish mobster as a cartoon caricature – a mix of James Cagney in The Public Enemy and Flattop (William Forsyth) from Warren Beatty’s 1990 comic strip detective movie, Dick Tracy.

Warner Brothers has released the first trailer for Ruben Flischer‘s period piece crime drama Gangster Squad. The film touts an ecliptic cast that consists of Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, Emma Stone, Anthony Mackie, Nick Nolte, Bryan Cranston, Michael Pena, Giovanni Ribisi, and more. The Gangster Squad is set in the 1940s and will focus on a special task force specifically designed to stop L.A.’s most notorious gangsters.

The movie looks visually appealing. Everything from the fashion to the set pieces looks absolutely incredible. And when all of that is backed by the aforementioned names, you have all the ingredients for an incredible movie. I especially love the look and feel of the of the artwork that appears up on Apple. It definitely pays homage to the art and style of the 1940s. You can check out the trailer below.

It’s being reported that Sean Penn, Josh Brolin, and Ryan Gosling have all entered into negotiations to star in Warner Brothers’ upcoming crime drama, Gangster Squad.

Penn would play Mickey Cohen, a former boxer who became a top mobster in 1930s-1940s Los Angeles. Gosling and Brolin would play two police officers out to find and stop Cohen after a string on innocent people are harmed and killed by the hands of the mobster.

Peter and Bobby Farrelly have been trying to bring their movie version of The Three Stooges to us for a long time now, and it looked as though things were going well when we discovered that they had Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, and Jim Carrey set to play Moe, Larry, and Curly. The project took a turn for the worst when it was announced that Penn was going to drop all of his film projects to concentrate on his family problems, which unfortunately ended with the splitting up of he and his wife Robin Wright Penn. Now comes word via The Boston Herald that Penn is back and ready to reacquire the role of Larry now that some form of resolution has been reached in his personal life.

This is obviously great news for the Farrelly brothers, who feared that his initial departure could spell the end for the struggling project, though there were rumors of the fantastic Paul Giamatti taking over for Penn.

In one of the more random announcements of recent memory: Sean Penn has decided to drop out of not one, but two of his bigger projects. Penn has informed producers that he will no longer be appearing as Larry in The Three Stooges, and that he also will not be appearing in Cartel — a movie about a man protecting his son from a gang of drug cartels who killed his wife. It appears that the actor has decided to step away from acting for a while after his Oscar-winning performance in Milk to spend more time with his family. Penn has two movies currently in post-production that are on the way, and also another project in pre-production called This Must be the Place, but no word on his leaving or staying with that film.

Universal seems to be fine with this and is going to recast his role in Cartel, which is still in the process of being written. MGM, on the other hand, has a little bit more of a problem to figure out. The Three Stooges movie has been up and down for years now, and it was only last November that it was announced that the Farrelly Brothers had moved the property from WB to to MGM and were finally moving forward with the movie. After that came the blockbuster announcement that the directing-duo had found their Stooges in Jim Carrey as Curly, Benicio del Toro as Moe, and Sean Penn as Larry. There’s the possibility that the Farrelly’s have other actors lined up for the roles, but at the moment, there is no word on how Penn’s departure will affect the forward-progress.