An international trailer for Gambit, a comedy scripted by the Coen brothers and starring Colin Firth, Alan Rickman, Cameron Diaz, and Stanley Tucci, has made its way online.
The film, directed by Michael Hoffman (The Last Station), is scheduled for release November 21 in England, with a stateside release slated for sometime in 2013. You can watch the trailer below, via MSN U.K.
The film is a remake of a 1966 movie of the same name, starring Michael Caine, Shirley MacClaine and Herbert Lom, and centers on British art curator Harry Deane (Firth) who devises a finely-crafted scheme to con England’s richest man and avid art collector, Lionel Shabandar, (Rickman) into purchasing a fake Monet painting. In order to bait his buyer, he recruits a Texas rodeo queen (Diaz) to cross the pond and pose as a woman whose grandfather liberated the painting at the end of WWII. It appears as if this one will be straight comedy.
You can take a look at three character posters featuring Cameron Diaz, Colin Firth and Alan Rickman below.
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The film has been long-suffering with distribution issues, and the fact that it has yet to be scheduled for a release outside of England is troublesome, to say the least. While the original 1966 film is quite fun and there is clearly talent involved here from the writers on down to the actors, Gambit will have to prove it can overcome its difficult path to release.
CBS Films initially had the film slated for a 2012 release stateside, but it has now been unceremoniously dumped into an unspecified future release date. The reason this is troublesome is, if the film was as good as it should be with the talent involved, why is its distributor doing its best to hide it?