Taking a bad reputation and making amends, CBS Films has been shaping up bit by bit these past few months by putting out more respectable material — The Woman in Black, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and the forthcoming, Coen brothers-scripted Gambit among them. Possibly continuing this trend is The Expats, a film version of Chris Pavone‘s thriller that, according to THR, has landed its screenwriter.

The person for this job is Alex Holmes (House of Saddam), who will be scripting a tale centering on “a wife and mother who after moving with her family from Washington, DC to Luxembourg discovers intrigue around her husband’s work in cyber-security and another newly arrived American couple who may not be what they seem. As she begins to dig into these mysteries while traveling around Europe, the truth threatens to drag her own CIA past into the open.”

Mystery, intrigue, spy groups, international travel — a well-balanced version of the story described above could prove to be a good time, making me all the happier that early reviews of the book (which is released today) have praised Pavone‘s story and, most importantly, the way he tells it. We’re already off to a good start.

THR chimed in a little more with the screenwriting news, telling us that Scott Rosenberg (High Fidelity, Con Air) will be rewriting Michael Bay‘s Pain and Gain. The source says that he’ll do a “polish and punch-up” of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely‘s script, a task that will probably, at the most, involve some added comedic lines. Not that those would be unwanted, given the right circumstances.

It it isn’t the first work of this sort that Rosenberg has done for the director, by the way; you can blame him for that horrendous Animal Crackers scene in Armageddon. Oh, to think what he’ll devise for Dwayne Johnson and Mark Wahlberg…

What are your initial thoughts on The Expats? Will a Pain and Gain rewrite make any noticeable difference?