Chadwick Boseman Has 7 Days to Kill in the Red Band ‘Message From the King’ Trailer

It isn’t always easy for Marvel actors to work on other projects after they’ve committed themselves to several years of blockbuster movies and marketing appearances. That’s why it’s so nice to see Chadwick Boseman in a movie where he doesn’t just play another superhero. After having its world premiere at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival, Boseman’s neo-noir Message From the King finally has a trailer (via /Film) to go with its intriguing premise. It’s nice to get a reminder of Boseman’s acting chops and why Marvel wanted him so badly in the first place. Someday, maybe Boseman will have his own supercuts of action-y goodness, too.

As the plot synopsis below notes, Message From the King takes the familiar idea of a family member seeking for revenge and introduces a few cultural elements that promise to spice things up. Hollywood tends to treat American organized crime as the be-all, end-all of violence, but there are places in the world where people live with deadly violence on a daily basis. If Message From the King plays with the idea of what happens when a group of stylized American gangsters come face-to-face with someone who has embraced brutal violence from birth, there could be an interesting cultural element at play that eclipses most of these films.

Here’s the full plot synopsis for Message From the King:

Jacob King arrives in Los Angeles from Cape Town looking for his missing younger sister. A stranger in a strange land, he has $600 in his pocket and a return ticket home in seven days. Within twenty-four hours Jacob King knows his sister is dead. This is the story of what happens in the next six days. As he searches for his sister’s killers King’s journey propels him deep into the LA underworld and its intersection with Hollywood high society. His pursuit of revenge will lay bare a network of depravity that stretches from the dive-bars of the gang heartlands to the glitz of the Hills.

Message From the King also stars Theresa Palmer, Luke Evans, and Alfred Molina and will hopefully land up in theaters some time this year.