The Professionals – Neil Marshall to jump in the Ford Capri with Bodie and Doyle

For those not in the know or outside the UK, The Professionals was a great show from the Seventies. It starred Martin Shaw (Doyle), Lewis Collins (Bodie) and Gordon Jackson fighting crime and terror at home and abroad for law enforcement outfit CI5. Doyle is an ex-detective constable who worked the seedier parts of London, while Bodie was an ex-paratrooper, mercenary and SAS sergeant.

It was a lot of fun, had a great theme tune and made Capris cool.

Neil Marshall (Centurion, Dog Soldiers, Doomsday, The Descent) has been talking to Empire about making a feature out of the series.

“It’s going to be a hard-hitting action movie,” says Marshall, “I always loved the show. It has one of the greatest theme tunes ever and a really great central premise. I just thought: this is going to make a great movie.”

“They deal with anti-terrorism, assassinations, political intrigue,” says Marshall. “The slogan, or kind of the tagline for the film, is ‘Fight fire with fire’ and that was their whole thing… Primarily it’s going to be an exciting movie, but there’s an inherent political angle on the story.”

“We want to contemporise it but keep everything that made the original great [but sadly not Lewis Collins], just turn it into a real wham-bam rip-roaring adventure movie. And a really great buddy movie: these guys are like Butch and Sundance or Riggs and Murtaugh. But this is a British buddy movie, which I don’t think I’ve seen before…”

Fantastic news as I think a Brit version of the typically American Buddy action film will be excellent and as Marshall will be involved there should be plenty of cool action and a healthy dose of violence.

Exciting stuff. Now who do we want to see playing Bodie and Doyle?