WTF: Red Bull Producing Parkour-Flavored 3D 'Oliver Twist' Adaptation

It seems like years ago that parkour was the next big thing — hell, Bond movies often lag a couple years behind trends in action, and it was Casino Royale in 2006 that brought the free-running urban sport to that franchise. But we just heard about Tracers, a bike messenger/parkour project selling at Cannes with Taylor Lautner in the lead. And now there is another movie that will feature stunt men climbing walls and running roofs.

This one, however, sounds a bit more weird. How so? Check it out: Twist is an indie 3D action version of Oliver Twist, the Charles Dickens novel. Funding the project is Red Bull which, as ad viewers know, gives you wings — wings enough to leap onto buildings, it seems.

Variety says Twist will "center around the novel's Fagin Gang, which will use the physical vaulting art of parkour to carry out a series of art thefts in the film."

There isn't much other info, other than that the story idea is from the Brothers Lynch and Simon Thomas (and Charles Dickens). This would hardly be the first wild adaptation of classic source material, though usually it is Shakespeare being twisted this way and that to become the basis for a film.

In addition, Oliver Twist has been adapted to screen more times than I could count on one hand, and so one more film version — even if it is a wildly re-worked telling — probably can't hurt.

Oliver Twist is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens, published by Richard Bentley in 1838. The story is about an orphan Oliver Twist, who escapes from a workhouse and travels to London where he meets the Artful Dodger, leader of a gang of juvenile pickpockets. Oliver is led to the lair of their elderly criminal trainer Fagin, naively unaware of their unlawful activities. Oliver Twist is notable for Dickens' unromantic portrayal of criminals and their sordid lives. The book exposed the cruel treatment of many a waif-child in London, which increased international concern in what is sometimes known as "The Great London Waif Crisis": the large number of orphans in London in the Dickens era.