Amber Heard is a talented young actress, but she has had a pretty rotten go of it in 2011. The calendar year saw the release of Drive Angry 3D, The Ward and The Rum Diary, but all of them bombed at the box office and received little praise from critics. On the small screen she appeared in The Playboy Club, which was cancelled before it could complete its first season. Heard will likely turn things around in the coming years and that may start with Albert Hughes' Motor City.

According to Deadline, Amber Heard has been cast as the female lead in the upcoming revenge thriller. The site says that there was heavy competition for the part, though it doesn't list any of the other actresses that were being considered. The film is set to star Dominic Cooper in the lead role as a man who is released from prison and goes after the people that framed him for a crime that he didn't commit. We learned in September that Cooper got the role because producer Joel Silver was so fascinated by the actor's performance in The Devil's Double. Heard will next be seen in Aram Rappaport's Syrup, in which she stars alongside Kellan Lutz, Brittany Snow, and Shiloh Fernandez.

As much as I like both Cooper and Heard, the plot of this film sounds exactly like Faster, the action film starring Dwayne Johnson that wasn't exactly a super-sized hit last year. Let's hope that Hughes has a few tricks up his sleeve and a solid script to work with.