Elisabeth Shue playing wife to Bruce Willis in Eli Roth's Death Wish remake

Elisabeth Shue has a new movie role - but don’t go expecting her to have too much screen time.

Deadline report that the 52-year old screen veteran, an Academy Award nominee for 1995’s ‘Leaving Las Vegas,’ has signed on to appear alongside Bruce Willis in Paramount/MGM’s upcoming remake of 'Death Wish,’ from director Eli Roth.

Willis takes the lead as Paul Kersey, mild-mannered architect-turned-vigilante, the role previously taken by Charles Bronson in the 1974 original from director Michael Winner.

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Shue will portray Kersey’s wife - and, as anyone who’s familiar with the original knows, her character meets an extremely ugly fate: raped and murdered by street thugs early on, who also assault the couple’s adult daughter.

When the police fail to apprehend the criminals (one of whom was played by Jeff Goldblum in the original), this spurs the previously peace-loving Kersey to buy a gun and take the law into his own hands.

Mike Epps, Dean Norris and Vincent D'Onofrio (who previously co-starred with Shue in 1987’s 'Adventures in Babysitting’) will also appear.

Based on Brian Garfield’s novel, 'Death Wish’ was controversial but hugely popular on release, and has since been widely lauded as one of the key American films of the 1970s.

However, the four sequels produced by the notorious Cannon Films in the 80s and 90s took a far more simple-minded and exploitative approach to the subject matter.

We can but wait and see whether this new take will follow the more grounded approach of the original, or the excess of the sequels - but with 'Cabin Fever’ and 'Hostel’ director Roth calling the shots, it seems fair to assume it won’t shy away from brutality.

Shue and Roth have shared the screen before, as the director and sometime actor (whose most notable role was in Quentin Tarantino’s 'Inglourious Basterds’) had a brief but memorable cameo in 2011’s 'Piranha 3D.’

'Death Wish’ is expected to hit cinemas at some point in 2017.

Picture Credit: WENN, Paramount