Having already commissioned the Legally Blonde screenwriting team of Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith to write the official, Millennium Films-sanctioned, female-centric Expendables spinoff The ExpendaBelles, the studio has now also gone ahead and hired that film’s director, Robert Luketic. The tone of that team’s commercial breakthrough certainly suggests this will be a less-than-serious interpretation of the action franchise, with Luketic's résumé also including comedies like Win A Date With Tad Hamilton, Monster-In-Law, 21, and The Ugly Truth (which Lutz and Smith also wrote).
Deadline initially obtained a log line that described the film thusly: “The world’s deadliest female operatives must pose as high-class call-girls shipped in by private plane to satisfy a dictator,” all in order to save a nuclear scientist—which certainly sounds like an exploitation throwback. But Millennium came back with a second, updated logline that says the film focuses on an “elite group of highly trained female mercenaries…brought together for a covert hostage rescue mission. Once they are behind enemy lines, the women discover that they will also need to topple an evil dictator bent on world domination. It becomes clear there is no such thing as the right man for the job.” Which basically just scrubs the “high-class call-girls” part and keeps the rest.
As always, it’s up to casting now to prove whether this female mercenary ensemble can truly stand up to the action movie all-stars of The Expendables—like the competing project that already nabbed Gina Carano and Katee Sackhoff—or just a Charlie’s Angels riff with a larger cast.