Shia LaBeouf and John Hillcoat Dial 'Triple Nine'

It's been a strange couple of years for John Hillcoat, the Australian director whose The Proposition opened a lot of doors he saw quickly shut in his face. He went on to direct The Road, shelved for a year by The Weinstein Company, which then decided to favor Nine in last year's Oscar race, the company's first without awards screeners, meaning many voters never even saw The Road. So that happened. And then, back in November, Hillcoat assembled a big list of talent for the period piece The Promised Land: Amy Adams, Ryan Gosling, Shia LaBeouf, Scarlett Johansson, Paul Dano, and Michael Shannon. Somehow, the financiers got cold feet and the project just fell apart. Unbelievable. Hillcoat has reconvened with Shia LaBeouf, though, on a little something called Triple Nine. The Wrap reports that the script "concerns a group of crooked cops planning a major heist who realize they must shoot one of their own in order to get away with it. The lead character is an upstanding young officer who they choose as their victim." Triple Nine refers to the police code indicating an officer is in need of immediate assistance. I'm guessing Shia will play the young cop on the right side of the law, but that doesn't really thrill me. So far, there's no studio - awfully tenuous stuff where Hillcoat is concerned, I'm sure - but it could wind up at Warner Bros. I hope something sticks for Hillcoat. He was pretty disappointed that The Promised Land fell apart, and who can blame him? Directors trying to climb the mountain don't get chances that good very often. I'd hate to think it was a reaction to the poor box office of The Road, which even though it wasn't a fantastic film, would have done better a year earlier instead of carrying around the black eye of being delayed a year, only to then be ignored by its own studio.