Penn & Bardem face off in non-stop action

MANILA, Philippines - The latest high-octane action movie starring Academy Award winner Sean Penn in his first action role in The Gunman that pits him against Academy Award winner actor Javier Bardem where Penn headlines as Jim Terrier, an ex-special forces government contractor who is betrayed by the organization he once worked for and goes on a relentless cat-and-mouse game across Africa and Europe.

Helmed by director Pierre Morel,  the director of the Taken films where Liam Neeson was catapulted to full action star status, Pierre once again launches and elevates the action genre and takes on Penn as his latest action hero to beat. The Gunman is a dynamic and exciting action film produced by Silver Pictures that reinvented Hollywood blockbuster action movie with Lethal Weapon and Die Hard franchises,  with Matrix that pushed the genre even further. Now, with The Gunman, the producers, director and actors create a whole new challenge upping the action genre a notch higher than its predecessors. 

Based on the bestselling novel The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Manchette, The Gunman follows Terrier on a wave of rush on a nearby beach of an African village. He runs Jim Terrier rides a wave on nearby beach of an African village. He runs towards the NGO office where he’s assisting with providing clean water to the villagers. Soon the piercing sound of a bullet exits a sniper’s rifle. Shortly after, news reports flood the TV with images of the assassination of the minister of mining. Genocide and civil war begin.

Terrier is convinced that the attack on him is connected to his old firm. Eight years ago, Terrier and his associates were paid to execute the minister of mining of the Democratic Republic of Congo. As he begins to connect the dots as to who ordered the hit, he discovers that his old boss and former comrade now works for the company that contracted them to complete the assassination and now finds himself dealing with his actions of the past and present.

Penn shares on taking his latest action role, “We always felt there was chemistry to be explored. Based on the choices I’ve made, and the material they have gone after, there had probably been a missing link that we’ve been looking for to make a movie together. Silver Pictures is notorious as a bulldog who gets things done. In everything we do, we are trying to make it the best we can and with Silver Pictures, it goes even beyond that.”

When Penn boarded the project, he immediately sat down with the scriptwriters to update and expand his character as an ex-special forces military man who then took on jobs as a mercenary contractor. “I’ve always looked at movies as individual movies, rather than genre. What we have here is by definition territory that is going to involve a lot of dynamic cinema, we are dealing with a high-octane environment, but there is a lot of the real world,” Penn further shares of the film’s theme.

The Gunman opens March 18 in cinemas nationwide from OctoArts Films.