Aaah, Yes! Yet Another WTF Moment...

From MTV's Splashpage:

It turns out that Sci Fi Network’s revamp of “The Phantom” isn’t the only classic Lee Falk comic currently bouncing around a production workshop. Anakin Skywalker himself, Hayden Christensen, has now been announced as the lead in Mimi Leder’s “Mandrake,” based on Falk’s slightly less famous strip “Mandrake the Magician.”

The movie, co-starring Djimon Hounsou, will follow Christensen’s character, an “underground magician and escapologist” who is approached by the CIA to do some work after “a daring escape from an SUV that has been dropped out of an plane at the Burning Man Festival,” according to SuperHeroHype.com. Hounsou will presumably be taking on the role of Mandrake’s assistant, Lothar.

Mandrake and Lothar will be a familiar characters to any watchers of the 1986 cartoon series “Defenders of the Earth,” which starred the pair alongside Flash Gordon and The Phantom.

The top-hatted hero — and possibly his sidekick — will be tasked with breaking a deep-cover agent named Xi Shing Lung out from a heavily fortified prison in the new movie, and according to the film’s synopsis they’ll have to do it Jack Bauer-style with a 24-hour deadline. Everything, of course, will turn out to not be as it seems, and Mandrake will end up finding himself at odds with a government agency gone rotten.

Leder takes over the director’s seat which was previously reported to be filled by “Scorpion King” director Chuck Russell a couple of years ago.