Matt Damon to reunite with Ford v Ferrari’s James Mangold for The Force

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

After starring alongside Christian Bale in James Mangold's FORD V FERRARI, Deadline has reported that Matt Damon is set to reunite with Mangold for the director's upcoming adaptation of Don Winslow's best-selling crime novel "The Force."

Matt Damon will play Denny Malone in THE FORCE, an NYPD detective who runs an elite crime-fighting squad who bends the law so often that he soon loses the line between good and evil and becomes ensnared in a corruption scandal. "To stop the city’s long-simmering racial tensions from exploding, he must reconcile the idealistic guardian he still views himself to be, with the corrupt cop he’s become," reads Deadline's synopsis. "He under siege from all sides: Harlem drug gangs, the mob he’s in bed with, the brother cops he’s about to destroy, the mayor’s office who fears what he knows and who he can implicate, the federal investigators who want to put him behind bars. But most of all, he struggles with the Faustian bargain on the table that will require him to testify against his loyal but dirty team, weighing loyalty to them over his own family." The first draft for THE FORCE was originally scripted by David Mamet, but James Mangold has been working with Scott Frank, who he worked with on LOGAN, on rewriting the script. THE FORCE isn't the only project which Mangold is developing to follow-up FORD V FERRARI, as Timothée Chalamet recently signed on to play Bob Dylan in GOING ELECTRIC, which is said to be set during Dylan's rise to fame as a folk music icon, and the outcry which took place when Dylan traded in his acoustic guitar for an electric and embraced rock n' roll.

A synopsis of "The Force" via Amazon:

All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop. He is “the King of Manhattan North,” a highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of “Da Force.” Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest, an elite special unit given unrestricted authority to wage war on gangs, drugs and guns. Every day and every night for the eighteen years he’s spent on the job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps. He’s done whatever it takes to serve and protect in a city built by ambition and corruption, where no one is clean—including Malone himself.

What only a few know is that Denny Malone is dirty: he and his partners have stolen millions of dollars in drugs and cash in the wake of the biggest heroin bust in the city’s history. Now Malone is caught in a trap and being squeezed by the Feds, and he must walk the thin line between betraying his brothers and partners, the Job, his family, and the woman he loves, trying to survive, body and soul, while the city teeters on the brink of a racial conflagration that could destroy them all.

Based on years of research inside the NYPD, this is the great cop novel of our time and a book only Don Winslow could write: a haunting and heartbreaking story of greed and violence, inequality and race, crime and injustice, retribution and redemption that reveals the seemingly insurmountable tensions between the police and the diverse citizens they serve. A searing portrait of a city and a courageous, heroic, and deeply flawed man who stands at the edge of its abyss, The Force is a masterpiece of urban living full of shocking and surprising twists, leavened by flashes of dark humor, a morally complex and utterly riveting dissection of modern American society and the controversial issues confronting and dividing us today.

James Mangold's FORD V FERRARI was recently nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.