Elmore Leonard’s novel Bandits is back in the hands of Bruce Willis—hands calloused to hard knobs from 28 years of holding Colts, AK-47s, Glocks, and the dozens of other guns he’s used to splatter blood across the screen. Deadline says that Bandits will be adapted for the screen by Mitch Glazer, with Willis starring as Jack Delaney, a reformed jewel thief-turned-mortician who’s turned back to lawlessness, after the corpse he’s supposed to be dressing turns out to be a live body fresh from a leprosy camp—and accompanied by a smoking hot ex-nun. Said ex-nun wants to return to the leper’s homeland of Nicaragua and set things straight with the Contras, so enter Willis, guns blazing.
For Willis, Bandits has been a long time coming: He first optioned Leonard’s novel when it was published in 1987, only to let his rights lapse. At that point, Quentin Tarantino snapped it up, along with several other Leonard stories, but only ended up turning Rum Punch into Jackie Brown. Now Bandits is back to Willis, who hopes to add his to a legacy of successful Leonard adaptations that also includes Get Shorty and FX’s Justified. It’s unclear when (or even if) it will begin production this time, but we do know that, according to the Internet Movie Firearms Database, Willis has used 106 guns in the course of his acting career—four of which came from 2001’s Bandits, a movie that also starred Bruce Willis. Presumably this new Bandits will differentiate itself from the old Bandits with the varieties of guns used.