Mel Gibson up for Cold Warrior

How's this for exciting news to get you through a dull Thursday: Mel Gibson is in negotiations to take the lead in Cold Warrior, the new film by his old Lethal Weapon collaborator Shane Black.

Black has been planning to make Cold Warrior his first directing job since the wondrous Kiss Kiss Bang Bang for some time, but it's taken a while. We spoke to him a while ago about the movie, and he had this to say: "It's about old-school espionage versus this new breed of peacekeeper spy," he said. "I think there's a great spy movie [to be made] that's not handheld."

Heat Vision is saying that the script for Cold Warrior was written solely by Charles Mondry, but we'd be amazed if Black hadn't had a major input. After all, the guy's one of the greatest screenwriters around.

As for the story, it will follow a Cold War spy who reluctantly drags himself out of retirement to tackle a new domestic terrorism threat from Russia.

To stop the fresh danger, he teams up with a younger agent. Gibson hasn't locked in a deal yet, but the chance to work with Black again? Surely it's a no-brainer. Although, having said that, Gibson famously turned down the chance to star in a Black-penned Lethal Weapon 5 just over a year ago. Clearly, though, there's no bad blood between the two.

Between this, doing the press rounds for Edge Of Darkness and dark comedy The Beaver, his planned Viking adventure and his soon-to-shoot Mexican prison thriller How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Gibbo is going to be a busy bloke. Still, the hard work should keep him out of trouble, eh?

/Empire Online/