If you ask me, Brian De Palma has been really underperforming over the last decade or so. I think I remember seeing Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia from him, and that’s about it. When was the last time I was truly excited to see a De Palma film? You’d have to go all the way back to when he worked with Nic Cage on Snake Eyes. Thankfully, the director has a new project in the works, and while it’s not quite as exciting as a re-pairing with Nic Cage, it does sound appropriately ridiculous. This time he’s working on a remake of a Burt Reynolds movie, with Jason Statham in the Burt Reynolds role. Probably not a lot of people remember 1986’s Heat, because by all accounts it was pretty bad. It’s the type of movie that goes through multiple directors over the course of its production, and then eventually forces the guy who has to take credit for directing to not even use his real name.

Normally I’m not a very big fan of the way rich people spend their money, but Megan Ellison got in my good graces the minute I heard about her existing by starting up Annapurna Pictures and lending funding to interesting sounding projects like John Hillcoat’s Wettest County and Paul Thomas Anderson’s upcoming Scientology movie. Her star dimmed a bit in my eyes, however, when she picked up the rights to the Terminator franchise with the intentions of making another Terminator feature. Why did this new angel in my life who appeared out of nowhere and started funding artsy films just stab me in the back by continuing a once-beloved franchise that has already been run into the ground? I thought for sure our love affair was over.

No, this isn’t a joint obituary. According to Aint It Cool, international star of stage and screen Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to join Sylvester Stallone for action flick The Tomb. Some people have golf. Some people have bingo. These two have action movies. But as old as they are (65 for Stallone, 64 for Schwarzenegger), it’s still awesome to see the two working together because it’s the culmination of every 1980s action dream out there. It’s Commando and Rambo! It’s Rocky and Conan! It’s Cash and The Terminator! It’s the kind of pairing that should make everyone want to pick up a ventilation shaft and throw it through the nearest kidnapper. The movie itself will feature a security officer (Stallone) who creates top-grade systems for jails that want to keep their prisoners in cells. When he’s framed and lands in one of those prisons, he has to use his knowledge to escape and seek retribution. Hopefully he also has to use his buddy with the grenade launcher and gubernatorial experience. As Harry Knowles points out, Bruce Willis was once going to star, then Schwarzenegger himself was going to take the lead, and now Stallone is doing it. So after turning the movie down to do The Last Stand, Schwarzenegger has decided he just wanted another role. If Willis signs back on, it’ll be the movie casting equivalent of square dancing (another thing retired people enjoy). It will also be awesome. Now the thing just needs a director…is Mark Lester still [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

If you would have told me a couple years ago, when I still had the bad taste of Cloverfield in my mouth, that J.J. Abrams’ production company Bad Robot had a new action film in the works, my ears probably wouldn’t have perked up much. But right now I’m still riding off the high of Super 8 and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, so questions of what Bad Robot is up to next are very much on my mind. Talk about a good 2011. Now, this company is famously secretive, so of course not much is know about their new project, but Variety is reporting that Abrams and his partner Bryan Burk, along with Let Me In director Matt Reeves, are set to produce a new action movie that will be directed by Brad Parker, coming from a script by Michael Gilio. Parker has one feature under his belt, The Diary of Lawson Oxford, and he did work with Reeves as a second unit director on Let Me In, but he seems to be a filmmaker that comes from the school of David Fincher. He cut his teeth doing a lot of commercial work and work for MTV, and then he stepped into the film world by doing digital effects for Fight Club back in the late 90s. It sounds to me like he’s learned at the feet of all the right people, so I’m interested to see what he has to offer as the man in charge.

UPDATED: Looks like this baby is still called Black Sands. One of TheArnoldFans sent us this – “SORRY…Okay, it looks like we are back to the film title ‘Black Sands!’ An Arnold rep contacted us and explained there must have been a translation problem from Google translator on the title. The original source, written by one of Arnold’s close Austrian friends, either accidentally wrote ‘Black Sunday’ or the translation to English was off. Either way, it  sounds like the plot remains equally as exciting with Arnold as an angel! Production start date: April!” We still haven’t seen any finished products from the newly out-of-retirement Arnold Schwarzenegger hit the theaters. But with his first project back in the acting world, Last Stand, done shooting, and the first trailer for Stallone’s upcoming Expendables sequel (where Arnie reportedly has a meatier role) having come and gone, all that will soon be remedied. Now that the action legend has his first round of comeback movies in the can, what’s next on his schedule? According to fan site The Arnold Fans, it’s going to be a movie called Black Sunday, which was previously being developed under the title Black Sands. Reportedly the film is about an immortal character who is in a war against a group of evil arms dealers. When asked details about the project, Schwarzenegger replied, “I’m a kind of angel,” but stopped short by adding, “I can not currently say more about this film.” His lawyers have trained him well. While I’m [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

My anticipation for the original The Expendables was massive, only to be matched in size and scope by my disappointment after I actually saw the film. Stallone’s new version of Rambo was awesome, it was packed full of R-rated action movie sleaze and it wasn’t at all ashamed of being exploitation. The Expendables looked like it was going to be a continuation of that, and also a massive team-up of bitchin’ 80s action stars the likes of which we’ve never seen. It didn’t really turn out to be all that though. It was kind of lame and boring, and really it was just a Stallone and Statham team-up movie with a handful of other cameos thrown in. So I’m approaching The Expendables 2 much more cautiously. But even with lowered expectations, I can’t help but feel a little bit of a tingle watching the first teaser. I don’t know if it’s going to be the classless, take no prisoners, R-rated schlock that I’m hoping for, but at least it looks like this one is finally going to be the huge team-up of old guys that I wanted from the first. The team-up aspect is all that can be discerned from this teaser though. It’s a teaser in the truest sense, basically we get the names and head shots of the principal cast and not much else.

After successfully bulking up enough to trade blows and dialogue with Tom Hardy in the recent fight film Warrior, Australian actor Joel Edgerton has proven that he can pretty much do anything. And after starring in another recent, high profile Hollywood film, the remake of The Thing, he has shown that he’s an actor whose star power is on the rise. So it makes sense to me that Warner Bros. and director Noam Murro would be looking at him to fill Gerard Butler’s shoes as the star of a 300 movie. According to Vulture, Edgerton is in talks to join Murro’s 300 sequel/prequel Battle of Artemisia as the lead badass Themistocles. Themistocles was an Athenian general and politician who is mostly remembered for leading the Athenian Navy in a successful campaign to beat back a Persian invasion. After his military exploits, he stuck around Athens as a bigwig politician, but eventually rubbed a lot of people the wrong way because of his arrogance. Also, he rubbed the Spartans the wrong way because of his insistence that Athens be refortified. Once he was eventually ostracized from Athens, he had nowhere else to go in Greece – he had pissed pretty much everyone off. What choice did that leave him? It meant that, in a stunning bit of irony, he had to flee to Persia and work in service of their king.

The teenage years are a time in everyone’s life when their minds are fertile for the seeds of change. A new experience can completely change a teenager’s personality, reading a new book or watching a new movie can radically alter the way that they self-identify. Peter Weir’s 1989 boarding school drama Dead Poets Society is one of those new movie experiences that I’ve often seen held up as a life changing experience. Multiple times in my high school career the movie was shown to my class by teachers trying to inspire a love of learning in the students. I’ve met more than one person bold enough to show me their “Carpe Diem” tattoo, which is the movie’s big rallying cry. In general it just seems that there is something about this film that resonates strongly and sticks with a large portion of the people who see it. Daniel Petrie Jr.’s Toy Soldiers isn’t a movie that’s changed many lives. That’s okay though, I don’t think it was trying to. It’s mostly just an action movie. This one tells the story of a prestigious prep school being overtaken by a group of well-trained, well-armed terrorists, who then hold the student body hostage until the government meets their demands. It’s strange how little this movie is ever mentioned by anyone. It had a cast of young actors including Sean Astin, Wil Wheaton, and Keith Coogan, that were all up-and-coming names back in 1991. It was an explosion packed story about terrorists and [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Details have been flying around about the fifth installment of the Die Hard franchise all year. First some plot details leaked, letting us all know that this time around Officer John McClane would be heading to Russia and encountering some terrorism related problems alongside his now adultish aged son John McClane Jr. After that, it became clear that Behind Enemy Lines director John Moore was officially on as the director of the film. Things were coming together, we were starting to get an idea of what this movie was going to look like. And today, the next step toward a potential fifth Die Hard film becoming a reality was taken. Fox has announced that Die Hard 5 is on their schedule for wide theatrical release on February 14, 2013, and that the official title of the film will be A Good Day to Die Hard. If you ask me, that sounds more like a title for a James Bond movie than a movie about rough and tumble NYPD officer John McClane, but hey, when I was watching that tank top clad jerk blowing up Nakatomi Plaza all the way back in 1988 I guess I never imagined that I’d be seeing him traveling to Russia either. In order to continue getting Die Hard movies, it seems like we’ve had to sacrifice some of their Die Hardiness in order to find new stuff for McClane to do. That’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world though. Watching Bruce Willis doing [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Young actor Zach Gilford is best known for his role as Matt Saracen, the unlikely choice for a starting quarterback on TV’s Friday Night Lights. Over the course of a few seasons, Gilford took Saracen from being a shy, mumbly-mouthed, and in-over-his-head second-stringer to being a less shy, less mumbly-mouthed star player with aspirations toward being an artist; so you know the kid has the chops. But even if you’ve already proven your skills on the small screen, you don’t just jump right into meaty Hollywood roles, you’ve got to pay your dues. To that end, Gilford has recently signed on to play Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sidekick in the upcoming action showdown Last Stand. Last Stand is the Kim Jee-Woon-directed Western that has been described as a cross between Die Hard and High Noon. It stars Schwarzenegger as an aging, small town sheriff who finds himself mixed up in some nasty business with a Mexican drug cartel. You see, one of the cartel’s big wheels has broken out of a U.S. prison, and Schwarzenegger and his sleepy town are the only things that stand between the escaped con and his pathway of destruction back into Mexico. I haven’t heard it mentioned until now, but apparently Schwarzenegger also has a bright-eyed young deputy under his command. This is the role that Gilford will be playing. It may not be a glamorous part, but you’ve got to break out of the stigma of being a TV and indie film actor somehow, and jumping into a [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

The first trailer for Mark Wahlberg’s upcoming team-up with Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur, Contraband, has hit, and it packs just about every action movie trope that you can think of into two and a half minutes. First off, Wahlberg plays a former criminal, who “got out of the life” and started a family. Then there’s the matter of a trouble-making brother (or in this case brother-in-law) who does something stupid and draws the protagonist back into doing “one last job.” We get the development of the wife and family being kidnapped, and even a Mexican stand-off with everybody pointing guns at each other. Pretty much this movie has everything an action fan could want. Check out the first trailer after the break.

You want big things to happen to your little movie? The secret seems to be to get it in as an entry to TIFF’s Midnight Madness program. The good news just keeps rolling in for films that played at midnight at this year’s festival. First up for a Hollywood remake was director Gareth Evans’s Indonesian SWAT team movie The Raid, which was very nearly just one non-stop action sequence. Then there was news that Adam Wingard’s home invasion horror flick You’re Next was being purchased by Lionsgate and set up for a wide release. And now Midnight Madness hits the hat trick, as THR reports that director Frédéric Jardin’s French thriller Sleepless Night is next in line for an English language remake. Sleepless Night is the story of a dad, a drug deal, dirty cops, a stabbing, a kidnapped son, a big bag of cocaine, and a nightclub all coming together to create chaos. Like The Raid, it’s getting a lot of comparisons to Die Hard because it’s full of action and takes place mostly in one setting.

Let’s face it. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the greatest actor of this generation. There were some dark days for moviemaking when he took that foray into politics in order to save California from itself, but it’s starting to appear like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. After a little hiccup involving impregnating the help, it’s looking like Arnie’s comeback to acting is going full speed ahead. His first foray back into the world of kicking ass and taking names will see him playing an aging law man in the upcoming Last Stand. Also, all of those rumors that he would have an extended role in The Expendables 2 have now been confirmed as true. That’s more Schwarzenegger than you can shake a stick at already, but Deadline Freistadt is reporting that things might be getting even more Schwarzeneggery real soon. Apparently the pinnacle of human perfection is now negotiating to star in a film called Captive, which would see Arnie playing an American real estate magnate living in Brazil who gets kidnapped and held for ransom. This one is being described as an action thriller, so I can only guess that things don’t go so well for the kidnappers once they get Schwarzenegger in their hideout. I’m picturing him ripping off their limbs and using them as clubs. Now I’m picturing him ripping off their genitals and shoving them down their throats. Probably he says something clever after doing it, but I don’t know what; that’s why they [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

When Sylvester Stallone started casting for the original The Expendables it was said to be an all-star action icon meet up. Anybody who had ever been in an action movie before, and even a lot of dudes who just slept on those guys’ couches for a couple months, were all rumored to be in the film. When all was said and done, however, it mostly just ended up being a Stallone and Jason Statham team-up movie, with a dash of Jet Li, a sprinkle of Mickey Rourke, and a very brief cameo from the other big action icons Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone. Not quite the all-star lineup people hoped for. Now that production is underway for a sequel, the rumor mill has once again been churning out hopes and dreams of an all-star action cast. Not only are Willis and Schwarzenegger supposed to have bigger roles this time around, but sources loosely associated with the project have intimated that huge names in the action genre like John Travolta, Chuck Norris, and Jean Claude Van Damme are all going to be in the cast as well.

After a tumultuous summer of back and forth negotiating, the people behind Die Hard 5 have made it official that John Moore will be the man directing the further adventures of Officer John McClane. It was reported back at the end of July that Moore was a near-lock for the spot, and that the fifth Die Hard film would take place in Russia and see McClane sharing the action with his son, who was just a tyke in the first film, but who is now all grown up. Then, just a few days later, reports came out that while the story synopsis was accurate, Moore was just one name on a short list that also included Joe Cornish, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Justin Lin. That made me happy because those other three have all made movies that I’ve liked better than anything I’ve seen from Moore. But alas, it wasn’t to be. It seems that the holdup in hiring Moore was that Bruce Willis wasn’t sold on him as the director. The studio, they love Moore, but Willis, not so much. That all changed when, after a series of meetings, Moore sold Willis on both his love for the McClane character and his practical effects over CG approach to shooting action. I have to admit, while I also love John McClane and practical effects, I’m still not sold that Moore is the guy for this franchise. If a franchise as long in the tooth as Die Hard is going to [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Word went around over the weekend that Fox is moving forward with Die Hard 5. The proposed project would be about Bruce Willis’s iconic character John McClane and his now adult son getting into some terrorist related hijinx over in Russia, and reportedly Max Payne director John Moore had an offer to direct on the table if he wanted it. Well, it turns out that’s half true. According to Deadline Vershina the movie is definitely going forward, it will most assuredly be set in Russia, but Moore is far from a lock to direct. As a matter of fact, they say he’s one name on a short list that contains far more interesting choices. Joining Moore on Deadline’s short list is Attack the Block director Joe Cornish, Bronson director Nicolas Winding Refn, and Fast Five director Justin Lin. Despite the fact that I didn’t seem to be as taken with Lin’s revival of the Fast and the Furious franchise as everyone else, I would have to say that every one of these names is more interesting to me than John Moore. Refn showed that he can handle darker, action oriented material with Bronson, and he’s riding a lot of momentum right now due to positive buzz on this year’s Drive, but he might already have too much on his plate to step into the Die Hard franchise. He already has two more films planned in Only God Forgives and a possible remake of Logan’s Run, both set to star Ryan [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

Good news for fans of guys who can kick high and have indecipherable accents. Jean Claude Van Damme has got his newest movie lined up and ready to go. Remember how excited everyone was when it was announced that Van Damme would be starring in the new Ernie Barbarash helmed film Assassination Games? Yeah, I don’t either. As a matter of fact, I think my Internet broke when I tried to Google its non-existent IMDB page. Regardless, producer Brad Krevoy is planning on teaming the actor/director duo back up for a new film called Six Bullets. This one would see Van Damme starring as an ex-mercenary kidnapping expert hired by a martial arts fighter to help him find his missing daughter. No, that wasn’t a typo, I actually did write all of those words in a row. I may not have ever heard of Ernie Barbarash, Assassination Games, or seen many of these lower tier Van Damme releases that have come out over the past decade, but I do remember when he played himself in 2008’s JVCD and I found the film to be surprisingly affecting and well made, and Van Damme’s performance to be legitimately nuanced and the best he has ever given in his career. What happened to that? Shouldn’t it have sparked at least one talented director to give this guy a more legit chance at a career resurgence?

There was something about Taken that audiences just responded to. I don’t know what it was, but I felt it too. For some reason we were all just ready to see Liam Neeson go completely badass and mess some people up. The guy may be in his 50s, but when he told those guys that he had the set of skills necessary to take them out in that trailer, we all believed it. So I went to see the thing, and I sat there, not expecting much, yet inexplicably drawn to the film. For the first 30 minutes I was pretty bored and upset that I had been sucked in by the ad campaign. And then his daughter got taken, and for the rest of the runtime the movie was pure, brutal ass-kickery. And I’m not talking about the flippy, dancy, show-off type ass kicking that we get in most movies these days. Liam Neeson was a bone breaking, tooth and nail, creepy psycho. It was very satisfying to watch, and the movie ended up making a ton of money. So, guess what, bad news for Liam Neeson… somebody in his life is going to be taken again! Can you believe it? Or maybe there will be a twist and this time Neeson will be the one who gets taken. Either way, Taken 2 is looking like it’s going to happen. Neeson seems to be on board, Luc Besson is going to write again, and they’ve found a director. This [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

While sitting down and chatting with Coming Soon, director Gore Verbinski explained why he would not be involved in the creation of a Bioshock movie after all.  It turns out he couldn’t find anybody to fund an R rated action film. To explain, Bioshock is a first person shooter video game where the playable character is a plane crash survivor who ends up stranded in a crazy underwater world. This undiscovered society has seen better days, is a little bit post-apocalyptic, and you end up needing to shoot pretty much everything that lives there to get your way through the story. Verbinski said of his position, “ … I wasn’t really interested in pursuing a PG-13 version. Because the R rating is inherent.” So studio accountants wanted to make a movie about a game where 90% of everything that happens is shooting things PG-13. What kind of a world are we living in?

In many ways, the end of the year is just like every other part of the year: we want to make lists. So we come up with lots of list ideas. One idea this year, like almost every year, is a list of the best action films. But this year, 2010, is special. This article is special. Why? Because this Year in Review article is going to kick off a brand new column that you’ll be able to rock and roll with every Wednesday in 2011: Bullet Points. Like The Coroner’s Report, Bullet Points will focus on a particular genre. I’m not talking down to you when I say that it’s action films,  though you probably guessed that pretty quickly. To kick off this column right and make 2010 just explode all over itself, we’re counting down our ten favorite action films.