After eight years of governating, are audiences ready for the return of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a regular big screen presence? With the actor closing in on 70, the window for action movie roles is quickly closing, but he's making the most of it. "The Expendables 2" opens this weekend, he's got "The Last Stand" arriving in theaters in January and he's getting ready to roll on the cop thriller "Breacher." And also on the way is "The Tomb," another flick with his buddy Slyvester Stallone, and the first official image has dropped.
Co-starring Jim Caviezel, Amy Ryan, Vincent D’Onofrio, 50 Cent and Vinnie Jones, and directed by Miles Chapman ("Road House 2: Last Call"), the film follows Ray Breslin (Stallone), a security expert who designed an inescapable, high-tech prison only to be framed for a crime and locked up in it. Arnie will play the standard hardened inmate with a heart of gold, with Ryan as Sly's love interest (!?) and business partner; D'Onofrio in the role of the deputy director of the Prisons Bureau who convinces Sly to do one last job; Jones as a ruthless guard and Caviezel as the prison warden villain. Seems like a rather rote genre prison flick, but the casting is interesting enough, so we'll see. No release date for this one yet.
But one movie that is quickly arriving is Rian Johnson's "Looper." Set to premiere at TIFF in September where it will kick off the festival, the movie brings together Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels, Paul Dano and more in the story of hitman who gets his targets sent to him from the future, and has to go on the run after his future self is sent back to be killed. Wrap your head around that one. A new image has dropped of Noah Segan in the movie — he's a frequent collaborator with Johnson, having appeared in the director's two previous films "Brick" and "The Brothers Bloom" — and it's keeping our excitement up for this one.
"Looper" opens on September 21st. [Wall Street Journal/HeyUGuys]