Schwarzenegger returns in Kim Ji-Woon's "The Last Stand"

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Korean director Kim Ji-woon may be poised to reach a more mainstream audience than ever before.

You can get his tremendously fun The Good, the Bad and the Weird on DVD now, and Magnolia/Magnet just picked up his new thriller I Saw the Devil for North American release in the wake of a successful showing in Toronto.

Now the director is reportedly set to helm The Last Stand, based on the Andrew Knauer script that landed on the 2009 Black List.

Latino Review reports that Kim Ji-woon is set to direct the film for LionsGate, with production set to start next spring.

The script is said to be a car-themed take on High Noon, following “A drug cartel king [who] escapes his trial in a 200mph Gumpert Apollo, and the only thing in between him and Mexican freedom is a small town cop in a bordertown.”

High Noon’s setup — a retiring/reluctant lawman stands alone against a gang of vengeful outlaws — is one of the most famous and oft-imitated in the world of film. It was referred to and inverted in Once Upon a Time in the West, remade as a space-bound thriller in Outland and touched upon in dozens of other films.

So a new version is hardly remarkable, but the concept is simple and flexible enough that there’s no reason not to put it back to work, as long as the characters involved are good. Throw cars in and you could have an instant mid-budget action flick with a simple enough premise that any marketing department would have to work overtime to keep audiences away.

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Lionsgate is setting a release date of January 18, 2013 for The Last Stand, the Kim Jee-Woon-directed return vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

That puts the film in wide release on the Martin Luther King holiday weekend.

Schwarzenegger plays a cop who leaves the LAPD in disgrace and takes a job in a sleepy border town. There's little action until when an escaped drug kingpin heads toward the toonlwn at 200 mph in a specially outfitted car with a hostage and a fierce army of gang member escorts. The cop is the only thing standing in the way of the kingpin making it back across the border to safety.

This was one of several projects that Schwarzenegger had percolating after he exited as California governor, until the subsequent paternity scandal seemed to cool everything off--the others included Cry Macho and a reprise as The Terminator.

Deadline revealed earlier this month that The Last Stand had come back together as Schwarzenegger's return vehicle. It'll be a test of his popularity, but it is clearly the kind of vehicle that fans of his old action films want to see him making.

Lorenzo di Bonaventura is producing and Andrew Knauer and Jeffrey Nachmanoff wrote the script.