Ethan Hawke and Antoine Fuqua are teaming up together again for a crime thriller called Brooklyn's Finest which is gathering a fine cast already.

Their last outing together was Training Day, which was a powerful thriller with some great performances from Hawke and Denzel Washington.

Brooklyn's Finest is set to carry Ethan Hawke, Richard Gere, Don Cheadle and Ellen Barkin, and is set to, as Rope of Silicon describe it, be a story of Crash (Filmstalker review) meets Training Day.

I don't know exactly what that means for a final film, but it's fair to say that it'll be a thriller and a half if they carry that off. It's described as an ensemble story that has three storylines that intertwine and involves Brooklyn police.

There was a rumour that Mel Gibson was close to signing for the film but didn't make it to the decision point, and for me that's one hell of a shame as he would have been a great win for the film. Seeing Gibson in a strong dramatic role like that would have been brilliant, and made me think of his outing in Payback, a hugely underrated film.

Surprisingly for such a strongly cast film, it comes from a first time scriptwriter, a normal everyday man was in a car accident and was stuck in hospital for an extended period and he decided to enter a screenwriting competition to win the money to buy a new car. Amazingly he won and he's gone onto write scripts for film and television, and this first script is being turned into Brooklyn's Finest.

Imagine that, your first script being helmed by Fuqua with Hawke, Gere, Cheadle and Barkin on board. Well done Michael Martin.