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 »
He's played cops, a count, Houdini, a time traveler, a king, and even a drag queen, but in this week's Lockout, Guy Pearce treads new ground as an all-out action hero -- not that he necessarily sees things that way. "People used to say that about L.A. Confidential," he recalled to Movieline recently in Los Angeles. "They’d go, ‘Wow, so you’re an action hero!’ I’d be like, action hero? It’s a ‘50s film noir!" Even still, after 20+ years of acting, most recently in a string of acclaimed supporting turns (see: The King's Speech, The Hurt Locker, Animal Kingdom, Mildred Pierce), it's only now that Pearce is laying claim to the title, guns blazing.
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The sci-fi action flick Lockout, directed by first-timers James Mather and Stephen St. Leger from a script they wrote with Luc Besson, features a scene in which characters somehow skydive out of orbit through the stratosphere to land, neatly and not even a little on fire, on an urban road. It isn't a sequence of events I'd ever have dreamed I needed to see on-screen, but boy, was I glad to.
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This week's Guy Pearce-starring, Luc Besson-produced Lockout might look like a run of the mill action pic -- that vague title doesn't help things -- but, as the film's opening scenes show, it's got a blustery '80s-style hero at its core and a punny sense of humor to move things along. Get a taste for the brawny bravado and hijinks to come in the film's first five minutes, viewable after the jump.
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The first American trailer for the sci-fi thriller
Lockout makes eminently clear what the
hard-boiled European original elided a bit: This is as close to an
Escape From New York remake as any of us are likely to get.
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When Luc Besson isn't directing standing ovation-worthy biopics these days, the French filmmaker is busy co-writing action thrillers for his studio EuropaCorp to produce like Taken, Transporter, Colombiana and up next Lockout -- the sci-fi adventure flick that sees Guy Pearce as a wrongly-accused government agent whose only shot at freedom comes at a very risky, space-age price.
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