We wrote a couple months ago about Renny Harlin’s upcoming film about the 2008 conflict between Georgia and Russia. Now, as then, I’m interested in the film to see if Harlin can take what made a few of his films really entertaining (I’m thinking of Cliffhanger, Deep Blue Sea and The Long Kiss Goodnight) and apply it to something that isn’t so flashy. Can he come up with a film that’s actually good? It’s been a while. Today he’s got some of the cast lined up for the picture, which we now know will be called simply Georgia.

Val Kilmer and Entourage’s Emmanuelle Chriqui are the leads in the film, says THR. Kilmer is a journalist covering the conflict; Chriqui is a Georgian grad student who becomes ‘entangled’ with Kilmer and his cameraman. We’d previously known that the film is about “an American journalist and his cameraman who arrive in Georgia on assignment, get caught in the crossfire as war erupts around them, and then have to deal with their obligation to be impartial journalists and their sympathy to locals they’ve met.”

When the film was first announced, Harlin said “I’ve waited a long time to find something with substance and reality. [This script]… was exactly what I had been looking for, a great human story, with tragic, serious overtones. I saw it as my opportunity to use my experience in action films to tell the story of a complex conflict that is impartial, but makes a strong anti-war statement.”

While Chriqui is primarily known for her Entourage appearances (she’s also in Women in Trouble and Elektra Luxx), Kilmer’s profile seems to rising once again. He hasn’t had a lot of really great work since stealing scene after scene in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but now he’s in Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant, and is the bad guy in MacGruber, along with a bunch of other roles that could turn out to be fun. Always enjoy seeing Kilmer when he’s on, so I’m glad to see him really back in style. (Though maybe Kilmer’s stock isn’t really back up to it’s old value, since THR’s headline was: ‘Entourage’ actress caught in ‘Georgia’.)