Sean Bean And Dougray Scott Cast In Irvine Welsh's The Magnificent Eleven

You might remember that, last May, Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh was announced as the director of The Magnificent Eleven, a modern remake of The Magnificent Seven that centers around a group of UK footballers (i.e. soccer players, which I pray doesn't really require explanation) who rally around a Tandoori restaurant. We still don't know that much about the picture, but at last there are some actors to associate with it: Sean Bean, Dougray Scott and Robert Vaughn have all been cast.

When Brendon covered the film last year, he threw out this synopsis:

A modernization of the classic western in which the Cowboys are a struggling local amateur soccer team, the Indians run a nearby Tandoori restaurant and the bandits are a group of menacing thugs led by a maniac known simply as 'Blonde Bob'.

We don't know what roles Bean, Scott and Vaughn will play; their names are all we've got right now. It's worth noting, as Screen Daily does, that Vaughn is the last surviving primary cast member from The Magnificent Seven.

And, yes, in the opening paragraph I referenced this film as a remake of The Magnificent Seven, which obviously originated as  a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. At what point is this just a modern remake of Seven Samurai? Good question, and I don't reckon we'll know the answer until seeing the film or getting ahold of Welsh's latest script draft. Besides changing the setting from Japan to America, The Magnificent Seven merged a few characters from Kurosawa's film and effected a few other notable changes. Since we're moving up from seven primaries to eleven in this film, could some of the excised characters from Kurosawa's film be making a comeback alongside the ones invented later?

Pete and John Adams wrote the original script draft, but when Welsh signed on he was said to be doing a rewrite in conjunction with the brothers.