Stand by your Mandrake

Despite having a couple of hefty hits like THE MASK and ERASER, director Chuck Russell apparently hasn’t had an easy ride — I’ve seen his name attached to at least a dozen projects, but the last thing that actually made it to screens was THE SCORPION KING.

Now Russell is donning his directorial top hat for MANDRAKE, based on the old Hearst comic character. The traditional incarnation was a stage magician who battled crime in his spare time between rabbit tricks, but the new version is apparently an edgy illusionist who gets recruited by the CIA for an important covert operation. (Make America forget about Iraq?)

The project is one of several “small to mid-sized pictures” from Baldwin Entertainment Group — they’ve also assigned Joel Schumacher to an action flick called 1:30 TRAIN, which may have nipples.