Gerard Butler to star in FBI thriller, The Bricklayer

After years of basically wasting away in bad romantic comedies, Gerard Butler's career appears to be on an upswing. There's some serious Oscar buzz floating around his upcoming performance in Machine Gun Preacher, and while it's a possibility he'll pop up as Leonidas in beefcake sequel 300: Battle of Artemisia, Butler is taking a more balanced approach to the roles he chooses.

THR notes that the Scottish actor has signed on to star in The Bricklayer, a thriller based on the 2010 novel by ex-FBI agent Paul Lindsay under the pen name of Noah Boyd. Butler will play former FBI agent Steve Vail, called back into action to take on a criminal element demanding an escalating amount of ransom payments. Hanna Weg is writing the script, and there's said to be big female role as an FBI deputy director forced to work alongside Vail.

On paper, this doesn't sound like a film that's going to bowl anybody over, but I'll take this over The Bounty Hunter 2 or another The Ugly Truth.  Boyd has been cranking these Vail books out at a pretty rapid clip. Vail has already been featured in two sequels, Agent X and Last Chance to Die, released just in May of this year. So could this be a potential franchise for Butler? The box office will likely be the determining factor.