Neve Campbell is the wild card in a new real-time British gangster film about four drug dealing punks trying to figure out which one of them has $4 million in cash.

It took ten years, but after debuting at the 1998 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and being staged in London’s West End the following spring, the play Matchstalk Man is finally set to be turned into a movie. Unfolding in real time, the black comedy adaptation takes place mostly in a derelict, abandoned warehouse, where four small-time hoodlums on the run from police engage in a game of cat and mouse to figure out where the cash proceeds from an illicit cocaine sale has gone. The film will mark the directorial debut of theater veteran Alexander Holt and will feature Neve Campbell playing the part of Pansy, one of the four conniving principals. Also attached to the film alongside Campbell are Billy Boyd (The Lord of the Rings), Kelly Reilly (Mrs. Henderson Presents) and Jamie Foreman, son of 1960’s London gangster Freddie Forman. ‘Matchstalk Man is a film about atmosphere, claustrophobia and above all characters and plot racing to a final conclusion which should leave the audience gasping, heads reeling and wanting more,’ Holt writes on the film’s official website. ‘We will be paying homage to a variety of styles using different formats e.g. for fantasy flashbacks, imagine the style of Tim Burton meets Quentin Tarantino; for the present grittiness of the warehouse, imagine Michael Mann meets Danny Boyle.’ Further bolstering the Matchstalk Man cast are a pair of co-stars with notable roles in recent musical biopics: Toby Kebbell, who played Joy Division manager Rob Gretton in the fantastic 2007 British film Control; and Leo Gregory, who portrayed Rolling Stones co-founder Brian Jones in the 2005 drama Stoned. Holt tells the Hampstead and Highgate Express that he and his partners have raised $2 million to shoot their $4 million caper and hope to roll cameras this summer for a planned February 2009 release. Other projects in the works from production company Quicksilver Films include the futuristic sci-fi thriller The Last Olympian and the thriller No Reason. (FilmStew