Cuba Gooding Jr has booked the starring role in a Canadian action/thriller titled Gridlocked, which will be directed by Allan Ungar, from a script penned by Ungar and Rob Robol. for Hackybox Pictures.

The feature film will see Gooding play a former SWAT team chief who who finds himself having to take on a team of mercenaries, with the help of the surviving members of a training facility that was attacked, and an actor shadowing him for a part.

The project is being shopped at the ongoing European Film Market in Berlin, with a spring 2014 shoot eyed.

Gooding will next star in Clement Virgo’s much-anticipated film adaptation of author Lawrence Hill’s award-winning bestseller, The Book of Negroes. He also has the Underground Railroad drama, Carry Me Home, on his slate, which should be released this year. That film tells a tale set in 1850, following a man named Samuel (Gooding), who attempts to free his family from institutionalized slavery, intent on escaping from the tobacco plantation they have been forced to call their home for two generations.