Saif gets to keep Kareena and Bipasha

The race in Bollywood to see which actors get the coveted roles of Mark Wahlberg and Edward Norton in Abbas-Mustan’s official remakeHollywood’s 2003 hit, The Italian Job, is over. Saif Ali Khan Hollywood’s 2003 hit, The Italian Job, is over. And, the winners have been declared: Saif Ali Khan and Neil Nitin Mukesh respectively. The Hollywood film is itself a remake of the 1969 British original by the same name starring Michael Caine. And Abbas-Mastan, Bollywood’s masala-suspense filmmaking brothers, have been considering all our coolest actors from John Abraham to Ranbir Kapoor for the lead roles.

Now, the choice has fallen upon Saif and Neil for this action-crime thriller about thieves planning to pull off the heist of their lives by first creating the biggest traffic jam in LA ever.Saif, actually, was a foregone choice for Wahlberg’s role, because he got on famously with the filmmakers when they worked together on Race. Now he is doing Race 2 also with Abbas-Mustan.It is not known whether the Bollywood version will also be shot in LA like the original, but there is no reason to believe it won’t be. Shooting begins sometime next year.

Abbas said, “We’re changing the original film considerably. There’ll be two important female characters in our version who weren’t there in the original.The Hollywood film had Charlize Theron playing the single female lead. Chances are, Abbas Mastan’s The Italian Job will have Kareena Kapoor and Bipasha Basu.