Radically upping its utility in a game of Great Character Actor Bingo, Gerard Butler’s The Headhunter’s Calling has added Alfred Molina and Willem Dafoe to its ambiguosly titled tale of corporate drama. (A brief digression: Is the apostrophe-s in Headhunter’s possessive—as in the destined vocation of a man or woman what hunts for heads—or a contraction, implying a phone call from someone who frees people from their need for hats? We may never truly know.) The film, directed by Mark Williams from a script by Bill DuBuque, will star Butler as a bloodthirsty corporate recruiter whose career ambitions are stunted when his son falls ill, teaching him the true meaning of something or other. (Probably, “Don’t be a jerk who works all the time, because maybe your son will get sick, and it’ll serve you right, we guess.”)
Dafoe, meanwhile, will play the outgoing CEO of Butler’s company, and Molina a sad-sack, unemployed engineer. The pair played similar roles—a corporate executive driven out of his place of business, and a scientist who struggled to find financial resources for his work—in the original Spider-Man franchise, suggesting—at least to someone deathly bored by the thought of watching Butler scrunch up his face and pretend to be sad in a series of pediatric hospital rooms—that the film is actually a bootleg Spidey sequel, with The Headhunter teaming up with The Green Ghoulie and Professor Squid to bring that infernal wall-crawler down once and for all.