After getting my hair blown back by all the awesome old man violence in the first Taken, I’ve been following the development of the sequel pretty closely. The idea of making a sequel to a film where a guy’s daughter gets kidnapped is a tricky one. What do you do, have her get kidnapped again? Have somebody else in the family get kidnapped? It’s pretty easy with a concept like this to get into ridiculous, “how does the same thing happen to the same guy twice” territory. But as long as they don’t dwell on the improbabilities and instead just focus on Liam Neeson brutally exacting his vengeance on bad guys, I don’t really mind. When Neeson first started talking about a sequel to Taken, I cheered. When it was announced that the film had found itself a director, I was cautiously optimistic. And now that word has come down the pipe that shooting will start soon, I’m officially getting excited. Producer Luc Besson had a chat with Coming Soon, and revealed that new director Olivier Megaton had been spending some time on a recent trip to LA to begin scouting for the film, that shooting would most likely begin in October, and that the entire cast of the first film would be back for the sequel. Wait. didn’t Liam Neeson kill everyone in the first movie? No, apparently Famke Janssen played his wife and she’ll be returning. I must have missed that while I was concentrating on all the [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]

Liam Neeson is soon to star in the film Unknown, which opens February 18th here in the US. But before he was able to so confidently open an action film filled with espionage and intrigue such as this one, he was first slotted into the starring role of the 2008 film Taken. In that picture he assured us that he was a man with a “very specific set of skills” which ended up mostly consisting of hunting people down and killing them in horrifically satisfying ways. It wasn’t a movie that should have made much of an impact at the box office, and it didn’t resemble anything that had real franchise potential; but there was something about the film that really resonated with audiences. When Neeson said that he had a specific set of skills in that trailer, people believed him. They believed him so much that they showed up to see him exhibit those skills in droves. And despite his advancing age, Neeson was able to convincingly kill a bunch of people without any of it looking unlikely or exploitational. Despite all rational to the contrary, Liam Neeson had become a modern day action hero with just one role, even though he was already a hundred years old. In an era with a pathetic cache of action icons, in an era where today’s children might not even understand the transcendental heroics of blowing a guy’s head clean off, a classic revenge film like Taken came as a huge breath [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 someone made a movie that combined The Fugitive, The Game, and Taken, would that pique your interest? Of course it would. And, of course it will. The new trailer for Unknown (which apparently isn’t called Unknown White Male anymore) shows a very confused, very pissed off, very revenge-fueled Liam Neeson as a man whose identity seems to have been stolen. The world that opens up is one of deception and conspiracy, and the coma he was in probably doesn’t add much to his credibility. The bottom line: this trailer is intense and promises a complex film with plenty of asses being kicked.

This week, on a very special Reject Radio, Rob Hunter drops by to declare his love for the online community, to denounce sex slavery, and to deliver some truly gruesome films to sit through. Plus! Fantastic prizes offered to anyone who sits through all the movies we suggest. Bonus if you eat pudding while doing it.

Star Liam Neeson said that there wasn’t a story, and that would be the sticking point, but that he and Besson were meeting to discuss the possibilities and to come up with something viable. Obviously, it’s not set in stone, but that’s nice to hear in a world where a title alone can greenlight a film before story or tone is ever even discussed.

I loved Edge of Darkness precisely because it was more than I expected.

Pierre Morel has been tapped to make a new Dune for Paramount. Pressing questions and Max von Sydow references inside.

In the last month of the past decade, we put our readership through the ringer. We unleashed list after list of our favorites of the decade and the year. And if you can suffer through one more round of awesomeness, it will all be over. For now.

Often “Best of” lists include a bunch of the Oscar bait roles that we hear about at the end of every year but in 2009 we had some great performances in big movies which sadly isn’t always the case. With this list I tried to balance the two opposing worlds of critical credibility and popularity by considering which roles stuck out in my mind most. This is what I came up with…

We see them plastered in lobbies and wish we had them all on our walls. Pieces of art with the purpose of selling us on a movie. Here they are: the best movie posters of 2009.

Rob Hunter recalls a year of marketing with 15 of the most exciting slices of cinema to hit big screens this year. The best trailers.

Today is Cyber Monday, the unofficial holiday that is the web’s response to Black Friday. Which means that its time to spend a bunch of money on Blu-ray movies, right?… Right?

So you want to leave your old life behind and start a new one, eh? Here are a few tips from films that can get you started on your foolish adventure into changing your identity and never being found again.

Two of those words in single quotation marks are movie titles. I’ll let you guess which ones. Suspense!

In Boston, the only city in America with corruption and crime, a policeman’s daughter is shot right in front of him, so he tracks down answers and sets to ass-kicking.

After riding around in a black-painted panel van, Liam Neeson will hop out, get in a car accident, and wake up to a world that doesn’t know who he is. Sound great right? Only one problem.

The gap is tightening – movies are either full-blown successes or major flops. In a content-driven culture, how are some films that fail at the box office supposed to fly under the radar to have a second-life on DVD?

There’s a long, illustrious history of movies that feature characters on quests for vengeance. Here are what we believe to be the ten most notable.

TV shows dominate the DVD column this week along with a pissed off Irishman, an eerie Ann Hathaway, unnecessary sequels, and a Norwegian parody of a Tarantino film!

Pierre Morel (best known to those who still insist on calling them “freedom fries” as the director of Taken) is slated to helm an action/espionage thriller set in Tokyo.