Bale & Wahlberg face off in Singer’s Prisoners?

Still very much in the daydream dreamteam stages, THR is seeding the rumor that Christian Bale might star opposite Mark Wahlberg in Prisoners — and Bryan Singer could return to his crime thriller roots to direct. Here’s the clock-ticking premise:

After his 6-year-old daughter and her friend are kidnapped, a small-town carpenter butts heads with a young, brash detective in charge of the investigation. The father is a Bible-reading, deer-hunting survivalist. The cop, meanwhile, can’t wait to get to the city. Feeling failed by the law, the father captures the man he believes responsible and begins to torture him in a desperate attempt to find out what he did with the girls, whom he’s convinced are still alive.

The onscreen collision of these two loose cannons comes about 10 years too late for this scene to be feasible, but I’ve seen the script and it flexes plenty of relentless narrative muscle on its own.