Also in Wednesday afternoon's round-up of news briefs: Breakfast At Tiffany's heads to Broadway. The Austin Film Festival sets its closing night selection. Hollywood gives its response to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter follow-up. And the producer of controversial video Innocence of Muslims remains in custody.
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Taken 2 grabs everything that was surprisingly enjoyable about the original film and batters it into the ground like... Liam Neeson beating up an Albanian human trafficking ring. The brute charm that the 2008 Taken found in portraying the Irish Oscar-nominee as an ultra-competent badass has withered to kitsch, and what's left is tinged with even more xenophobia and weird paternal wish-fulfillment. Worse, the directing reins have been handed from greater Luc Besson protégé Pierre Morel to the lesser (but, granted, more awesomely named) Olivier Megaton, of Transporter 3 and Columbiana, and he slashes the action sequences to such incoherent bits that half the fights could have been shot on a sound stage thousands of miles from any star and chopped in after the fact. Why are we watching this again?
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I'll give Liam Neeson this much. He's even braver in real life than the hard asses he plays in the movies. The New York Daily News reports that Neeson, 60, raised $20,000 for breast cancer research on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Monday by stripping down to a pair of pink bikini briefs and entering a dunk tank on the talk show. more »
If you don't have a whiny, teenaged kid, then watch this latest trailer for Taken 2. Although Maggie Grace, as Kim, is ostensibly playing a woman in her 20s, she's behaving just like a 15-year-old! Even under life or death circumstances, adolescents can behave as if they are stuck in their own little personal pool of molasses, and it's up to Dad — or Mom — to gnash some teeth, raise the voice and light a fire under the kid's reluctant ass. more »
Looks like Taken 2 could be subtitled All in the Family, or maybe Bad-Ass & Daughter. Liam Neeson is back as retired CIA operative Bryan Mills, and based on the plot points covered by the two new trailers posted below, he enlists daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), who he gallantly rescued in the first Taken, to assist him in saving her Mom (Famke Janssen) from the bad guys. Turns out the motive for moms kidnapping is familial in nature, too: She's been taken by the father of the kidnapper Mills killed back in the first flick. more »
In 2008's B-movie hit Taken, Liam Neeson cracked skulls across Europe in search of his kidnapped daughter. In October's Taken 2, director Olivier Megaton and producer/co-writer Luc Besson set out to achieve something rare — An actual continuation of story! Multi-film character development! Unexpected moral examinations! — a proper sequel, in other words, as evidenced by the first trailer viewable after the jump.
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Some days you just need to see, as SCTV’s Farm Film Report guys Big Jim McBob and Billy Sol Hurok used to put it, stuff blowed up real good. If you’re having one of those days, Peter Berg’s Battleship is as good a choice as any. Beyond that, you should know a few things going in: Battleship is allegedly based on the Hasbro game of the same name, but never in the film is the line “You sunk my battleship!” uttered, so don’t expect a refund. Also, one of the invading aliens – spoiler, sorry! – looks a little like the guy from that ’90s Swedish band Stakka Bo.
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I've always had a weak spot for Andy Samberg's impression of Nicolas Cage on SNL's Weekend Update, which the show revived over the weekend to help pimp the NBC Universal property Battleship. This called for the appearance of that film's co-star Liam Neeson — or Neese's Pieces, or Tall Bono, or Leslie Nielsen, or whatever else Cage felt like calling the actor when he wasn't wondering, "Which Jewish masseuse do I have pork to get a gig in this town?"
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Ever since growling his way through 2008's gloriously B-movie-esque B-movie Taken, Liam Neeson's been enjoying his newfound status as the gruff hero with killer instincts and a particular set of skills that you want on your side in the event of a kidnapping/assassination attempt/jailbreak/wolf attack. So why fix something that ain't broke? Enter Non-Stop, Neeson's next actioner and an airplane-set excuse to see Neeson smash heads and deliver straightfaced epic one-liners.
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The 10 years that we are told at the beginning of Wrath of the Titans have passed since Perseus (Sam Worthington) defeated the Kraken may not seem like long enough, especially when you consider that it’s only been two since the Clash of the Titans remake was released, Kraken-like, on an unsuspecting populace. It was sufficient time, anyway, for Worthington to grow out his hair, so that in Wrath of the Titans he sports a soft cap of curls to go with his peaceful life among the humans. He’s lost a wife but gained a son and another pretext to propel a franchise whose fate was sealed once Avatar’s numbers started rolling in. That it was going to happen was certain; how it happened was of secondary concern.
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Forget John Carter's controversial budget woes and terrible tracking for a minute; Wrath of the Titans has been threatening to be the first big biff of 2012 since it was announced, thanks largely to its poorly received predecessor, Clash of the Titans. The sequel's initial Marilyn Manson-themed trailer didn't help, either, but Warner Bros. have thankfully tightened things (and stopped lingering on Sam Worthington's Kenny Powers 'do) for a new trailer that actually promises some fantastic CG creature work. Bring on the lava monster thingy!
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If you enjoyed watching Liam Neeson battle territorial wolves in Joe Carnahan’s The Grey — and plenty of moviegoers have — then you'd be well-advised to look into Lee Tamahori's 1997 thriller The Edge. Starring Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin and perhaps best characterized by screenwriter David Mamet's trademark clipped dialogue, the film is an unusually strong entry in the survival-story tradition — and one to which The Grey owes at least a spiritual debt (if not more).
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Maybe you can't quite ask Woody Harrelson anything, but at least he has a forthcoming contemporary in Russell Crowe. The Oscar-winner recently leveled with fans on Twitter, acknowledging his and Liam Neeson's interest in Darren Aronofsky's biblical epic Noah while putting a swift, certain and severe end to speculation that he may participate in a RoboCop.
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Two supernatural thrillers joined a pair of spooky holdovers in the top five of this weekend's box office, where one of the world's biggest stars was no match for the low-budget telepathic shenanigans of Team Chronicle. And, er, what happened to Drew Barrymore? Your Weekend Receipts are here.
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Joe Carnahan probably knew he was in for something of a tussle when his latest film, the survival actioner/mortality meditation The Grey, began drawing criticism from animal activist groups sight unseen even before it debuted (at #1, no less) last weekend. But then PETA posted its own twofold complaint regarding the depiction of wolves in the film and the reported eating of wolf meat on Carnahan’s set, escalating the anti-Grey fight. The question is, does PETA have a legit beef with The Grey?
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