'Jungleland' Trailer: Charlie Hunnam And Jack O'Connell Are In For The Fight Of Their Lives

In Jungleland, Charlie Hunnam and Jack O'Connell are brothers who travel across the country for a high-stakes fighting tournament. This premise sounds similar to Warrior, the Tom Hardy-Joel Edgerton flick, but based on the trailer below, Jungleland has new things to offer. The film played at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival and is headed to Premium Video-On-Demand and for Digital in November.

In Jungleland, "Stanley (Charlie Hunnam) and Lion (Jack O'Connell) are two brothers struggling to stay relevant in the underground world of bare-knuckle boxing. When Stanley fails to pay back a dangerous crime boss (Jonathan Majors), they're forced to deliver an unexpected traveler as they journey across the country for a high-stakes fighting tournament. While Stanley trains Lion for the fight of his life, a series of events threaten to tear the brothers apart, but their love for one another and belief in a better life keep them going in this gripping drama that proves family pulls no punches."

I missed Jungleland at TIFF last year, but I will say this is an effective trailer. It's well put together and does a good job selling a melancholy tone for the flick, which is not what I was expecting from the synopsis.

"I'd always wanted to write sort of an unconventional love story," director Max Winkler said in an interview with Deadline, "and this one is about brothers. It's sort of like the male dramas of American film in the '70s—Bob Rafelson movies like The King of Marvin Gardens and Five Easy Pieces, and Hal Ashby's The Last Detail. I love Paul Newman in Hud. I just loved these movies about masculinity, and how we mask our true emotion with these sort of faux facades of toughness, and that, paired with how much I love John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, was the early starting point for me, when I started writing this. I knew I wanted to make a movie about toxic masculinity and brotherhood, [because] this type of love story is not something you see a lot. We sent it to Charlie with our fingers crossed, and it was then that we really started kicking in gear."

Name dropping all those titles sure goes a long way toward making me interested in seeing this thing. The screenplay comes from Winkler, Theodore B. Bressman, and David Branson Smith, and in addition to Charlie Hunnam and Jack O'Connell, the cast includes Jessica Barden and Jonathan Majors. Jungleland arrives on VOD and digital purchase on November 11.