One good ammo-riddled torrent of multiplex marketing deserves another, right? Never mind. Ready or not, and on the heels of this afternoon's wild End of Watch spot, behold a new trailer for The Expendables 2. It's got more bullets than brain cells, and someone literally died in one of these explosions (or at least one like them), but who can argue with Arnold Schwarzengger quipping, "I'm back!" or Jason Statham issuing a smirking pronouncement of "man and knife"?
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In movie terms, Jason Statham is a man without a country, an actor who fits so conveniently into a certain kind of movie that almost no one can think of him any other way. Where, oh where, can he go from here? Statham is the go-to guy for action movies that require an appealing, thoughtful protagonist who looks great shirtless, and Boaz Yakin’s Safe is, unfortunately, just more of the same, or perhaps even less of the same. It has neither the Red Bull–fueled crudeness of Crank nor the Frenchified lunatic vitality of the Transporter movies; it’s not even as cheaply entertaining as the generic hit-man retread The Mechanic. Safe shows Statham comfortably treading water, proving all the things he no longer needs to prove – chiefly, that he’s a terrific action performer who moves with more grace than pretty much anyone else in the film world. The picture fails to challenge him. Safe is safer than safe – it’s so relentlessly kinetic that it ends up being dull.
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Filmmaker Boaz Yakin has taken a circuitous route through the years tackling indie dramas (Fresh, A Price Above Rubies, Death in Love) and studio gigs (Remember the Titans, Uptown Girls) alike, not to mention his writing stints on films like Prince of Persia and producing duties on the Hostel films. But this week’s Safe, a frenetic throwback actioner starring Jason Statham, marks a return to his roots — both to the streets of New York he grew up loving and to the genre beginnings that gave him his start.
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This Friday Jason Statham charges into theaters as a cage-fighting ex-NYPD officer who protects a 12-year-old Chinese girl from the Triads, the Russian mob, and corrupt city officials in Boaz Yakin's throwback actioner Safe. So what better way to celebrate the stone-cold suaveness of Britain's most bad-ass action export than by penning a 10-word review of any one of his films? Transport yourself into Statham mode, crank up the chaos, and expend your best critique for your chance to snatch up the grand prize. UPDATE: Contest is now closed. Read the winning 10-word review!
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Marvel and Disney have officially released a clip from The Avengers, with Scarlett Johansson kicking ass in a cocktail dress while bound to a chair. I would go on, but you've seen it all before: It is basically the same fight scene Jason Statham staged last year in Killer Elite, except with boobs. Click through to view both.
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Alfred Hitchcock and Cecil B. DeMille might have been able to successfully redo their own movies, but more recent auto-remakes, especially ones that find directors cranking out a U.S. version of their own foreign-language hit, have been a motley crew. The best, like Michael Haneke's 2007 Funny Games and Takashi Shimizu's The Grudge, tend to be merely functional enterprises that revisit what worked the first time around with added English-speaking and possibly more famous actors. But others highlight in a painfully clear way the compromises that so often come with working in Hollywood. Ole Bornedal's wan Nightwatch lost the nasty edge of the Danish original and retained no other distinguishing characteristics, and George Sluizer's 1993 The Vanishing ditched the finale of his 1988 Spoorloos, an uncompromisingly bleak and great ending, for a studio-friendly happy one that undoes everything toward which the first film built.
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Not even yesterday's first look photo of Robert De Niro and his great big bushy beard could prepare us for the non-stop macho action in the trailer for the Jason Statham-Clive Owen starrer Killer Elite, which hit the web today. After the jump, watch the wealth of punches, power kicks, explosions, gunshots, inventive action moves, and unabashed man love on display in the span of a minute and forty seconds. Then mark your calendars for September 23.
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