Our movie history includes a lot of movies about sheriffs, but they're almost always the same kind of sheriffs: lawmen trying to keep the peace in some hard-bitten town out west, usually in the 18th century. Leave it to Kevin Costner, who already pretty definitively put his stamp on the Civil War-era West, to change up the decades on us.
Variety reports that Costner will direct and star in the action-adventure A Little War Of Our Own, playing a small-town sheriff trying to keep the peace back home while World War II rages overseas. The other lead role will be that of a German U-boat commander, who for unexplained reasons winds up in a small American town instead of, you know, under the ocean. They're casting that role right now, which I presume means Christoph Waltz's agents are trying to figure out how to handle Costner's phone calls.
Costner hasn't directed a film since 2003's Open Range, and since then has taken enough roles in small movies like The Upside of Anger and The Company Men to make us all forget that at one point we all hated him for making both The Postman and Waterworld. It's a great time for Costner to return to the director's chair, a little too old to be the leading man but still as likable as ever (I say this as one of earth's few people who saw him in 2008's Swing Vote). As a child of the 80s and 90s, I'll have a lifelong soft spot for Costner, and will welcome him back for anything but The Postman 2.
