Renny Harlin Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Poor New Orleans! As if the real-life horrors of Hurricane Katrina and the broken levees weren't bad enough, now the beautiful city must suffer from the devastation wrought by Danny Fisher, played by former * WWE wrestler / entertainer John Cena in 12 Rounds, the latest train wreck from director Renny Harlin. "Damn the property damage! I'm going to save my girlfriend, whatever the cost!" is a noble sentiment, especially when you don't have to pay the bills.

Danny isn't really responsible for the carnage he causes, of course, even though he politely apologizes whenever he crashes into other people's vehicles or accidentally kills people. (Cena furrows his brow and turns his smile upside down, just so you know he's not happy with himself.) The real blame lies with Miles Jackson, who is seeking revenge on Danny for the death of his girlfriend. Jackson is described as an international arms dealer, but he spends much more time blowing things up and changing SIM cards in cell phones than any actual dealing of arms.

Aidan Gillen, who was superb as a cagey, ambitious, well-intentioned politician in The Wire, has much less to play with here, but it's fun to watch him try to juice up the role of an exceptionally-nasty master criminal with absolutely no scruples or second thoughts. He provides one of the few true pleasures in 12 Rounds, which should be a lot more fun than it is. Instead of embracing its loonier plot elements -- a fire engine crashing across town, a ticking time bomb on a public bus, an out-of-control street car -- 12 Rounds insists on playing it straight as a sober drama, ending up as Speed without the flirtations or thrills.

Damned if you have a mic, damned if you don't... Coming to you loudly (at least in my case) is the latest episode of The Cinematical Roundtable, and this time, we don't even dare leave the lobby before offering up our thoughts on the rock-'em-sock-'em likes of 12 Rounds, in addition to the week's other wide releases, The Haunting in Connecticut and Monsters vs. Aliens.

Rounding out the proverbial 'we' this week is Brian Orndorf, he of multiple outlets, not the least of which are eFilmCritic and DVD Talk. Also, my good friend Tyler serves as a last-minute substitute for a colleague fallen ill (that, or he just really didn't want to sit through a John Cena flick). He knows his stuff, which I can't say for all in our field, and he happened to be co-anchor of our college movie talk show, "Matinee Idle," which was pretty much a podcast before podcasts were podcasts.

So... yeah. He's good people. Enjoy!




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Hopefully Sean O'Keefe and Will Staples are going to have a little more luck getting their new script into production than they have in the past. Variety reports that the duo has sold a pitch to Universal for a political action thriller. The yet to be titled flick would center on "an elite team that secretly journeys to a foreign country to take down an international criminal. When the mission is compromised, the team suddenly finds itself on the run, desperate to uncover the truth behind a major conspiracy."

O'Keefe and Staples are relatively new to the screen writing game. Back in 2006, the two had been tapped to write a feature version of the graffiti video game Getting Up. Considering O'Keefe's experience with writing video games, this would have been a perfect fit. Unfortunately, Getting Up hasn't been heard from since -- which is probably for the best. The duo's bad luck continued when they were hired to write Renny Harlin's The Northmen and Roland Emmerich's The Murder of King Tut, and both of those films have yet to materialize. In fact, the projects seemed to have disappeared altogether. So for O'Keefe and Staples' sake, I hope that this time Universal lets these two make an honest to goodness movie. If not, I guess they can always go back to video games.

Just in case you can't get enough of the WWE already, they're really getting into the movie biz. Variety reports that they're teaming up with Fox Atomic for a new action movie called 12 Rounds. The flick will be helmed by Renny Harlin -- the man behind Die Hard 2, Deep Blue Sea, and my personal favorite -- A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master. (Yes, I like that movie. A lot.) Now, being a WWE feature, there's got to be some wrasslin' in the mix, so the cast will be led by John Cena, and also include Steve Harris (The Practice), Aidan Gillen (The Wire), and Brian White (Stomp the Yard).

The picture will follow "a New Orleans police detective (Cena) whose girlfriend is kidnapped." Harris will play an FBI agent, presumably helping on the search, White is a cop who works with Cena's character, and Gillen, who used to be sweet as Aidan in Circle of Friends, is taking on the role of the kidnapper. According to IMDb, that also makes him an "evil crime lord" who forces him to go "12 Rounds," hence the film's title.

Should this work out as well as Cena's last WWE feature, The Marine, this should be a sweet moneymaker for the company. In the meantime, we've got to see if any of the rumored cast sticks around -- everyone from Al Pacino to Piper Perabo and Method Man have been rumored to have parts.

A potentially compelling film noir story delivered in an irritatingly bright and overzealous package, Cleaner has two very excellent things going for it -- and their names are Samuel L. Jackson and Ed Harris. If you're a serious fan of either actor (and if you're not, you should be), then you'll definitely want to rent Cleaner once it (eventually) pops up in your local theater video store. Beyond the contributions from Jackson and Harris, however, there's very little worth talking about where Cleaner is concerned.

We start off with a potentially juicy concept: Sam Jackson plays a 'hazardous waste cleaner' who gets framed for a murder he (probably) didn't commit. And when I say 'hazardous waste cleaner' I mean that this is the guy who'd come to your house to eliminate the gore if someone happened to have their brains blown out in your living room. So things look pretty promising at the outset: We've got a great actor playing a strange role and doing a fine job of it -- and then the plot kicks in.

Seems that our "cleaner" has just cleaned up a murder that the police know nothing about. And even if they DID have a clue, they'd probably be thrilled about it because the victim was a stool pigeon who was about to blow the lid off some serious police corruption charges. So when Cleaner guy realizes that he forgot to return the house key, he's distressed to learn that The Wife (Eva Mendes) knows nothing about any bloodshed in her living room. But, oddly enough, her husband has just gone missing. (dun dun dunnnnn)

It's been over ten years since the Renny Harlin action flick The Long Kiss Goodnight hit theaters. But if Samuel L. Jackson and Harlin have their way, a sequel could hit theaters sometime in the near future. MTV's movie blog spoke with Jackson about working with Harlin on some possible script ideas and Jackson says, "We sort of have a development project now for The Long Kiss Goodnight 2, we're talking to writers, you know, getting it together." The original film was centered on a seemingly meek and mild housewife (Geena Davis) who turns out to be a bad ass super-agent suffering from amnesia who is up against some shadowy government types. Jackson was along for the ride as a hard-drinking private eye.

The film was the second attempt for Harlin to turn his then-wife Davis into a female action hero, the first being the less than stellar pirate flick Cutthroat Island. The two films didn't seem to help their relationship and the couple were divorced in 1998. But it doesn't look like Davis is figuring into Harlin and Jackson's plans for a sequel. "Actually, we're thinking, you know, the little girl [Samantha's daughter, Caitlin] is grown up now and possibly got some skills passed onto her by her mom," Jackson says. And if that wasn't enough of a hint, he even spells out that the actual idea is "Her mom gets killed and we want to find out who did it." It looks like they will have plenty to talk about while they are working together on Harlin's latest thriller Curve.

Mandate Pictures announced yesterday that Eva Mendes has signed for Curve, a thriller about a woman who takes a detour into a backwoods area of New York and "finds herself at the mercy of a psychopathic killer." There's no other description given so far, but the film is being written by James Vanderbilt, who wrote the John Travolta military suspense film Basic as well as David Fincher's procedural Zodiac, so its more likely to be a full-on suspense film than any kind of Wolf Creek type-deal, I would imagine. As for Mendes, she was most recently seen in the Tribeca film Live! and will next appear in the crime drama We Own the Night, alongside Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg. She's also currently working on Renny Harlin's next film, Cleaner, a crime thriller about a former cop played by Samuel L. Jackson who now makes a living cleaning up crime scenes.

So what have we learned here? Eva Mendes doesn't like romantic comedies or isn't being offered them anymore, I guess. In conjunction with the Mendes announcement, Mandate Pictures also announced on Friday that they are getting more involved in direct-to-DVD films, launching Grindstone Entertainment Group. The deal will allow for up to six films a year to be made under the banner, which will be specifically for home entertainment distribution, as well as online and mobile.

Well, we all know how well Code Name: The Cleaner performed at the box office, but did you know there's another Cleaner heading our way? No, it thankfully will not be a sequel to the Cedric the Entertainer flop. (Question: Are you allowed to call yourself "the entertainer" when people aren't very entertained by your work?) The other film, simply titled Cleaner, is a thriller that stars Samuel L. Jackson, Ed Harris, Christa Campbell, Keke Palmer and, now, Eva Mendes -- who, as you all know, is my imaginary wife from a parallel universe. But, anyway ...

We've been covering this film for awhile now, ever since Sammy Jackson first signed on to star. Basically, Jackson plays one of those guys who cleans crime scenes for a living, and when he winds up covering up a homicide that hasn't been reported yet, guess who gets blamed for murder? Mendes will play widow to the murder victim, who turns to Jackson for some help (cleaning her apartment, we wonder?). Of course, pic is being directed by Renny Harlin, known for such gems as Deep Blue Sea, Exorcist: The Beginning, Mindhunters and The Covenant. Will Cleaner, um, clean up at the box office? I guess we'll soon find out; shooting began yesterday in Louisiana.

The Covenant revolves around a coven of hard-bodied Harry Potters in a Northeastern prep school. They are descendants of those famously accused witches of Salem, who were apparently the real deal after all. It's pointed out to us that these boys are actually more like witch-kids than witch-men, because they haven't yet reached a crucial birthday in the life of a male witch. At age 18, they will "ascend," which means they'll receive some kind of cosmic endorsement of their witchy virility and gain extra powers. They're already incapable of dying -- we see one of them smash his car head-on into a Mack truck, only to have the car and driver re-assemble in mid-air. But, horror of horrors, they can still grow old. The main witch, Caleb (Steven Strait) takes his new girlfriend Sarah (Laura Ramsey) to meet his father, a bedridden invalid who looks like Hugh Hefner after an hour in the tub. "He's 44 years old," Caleb whispers to Sarah, causing her to bite back a scream.

Age is a constant theme in The Covenant: The main characters discuss "turning 18" throughout the film, usually before or after one of the scenes in which they peel off their clothes and flex finely-chiseled abs. At times, I felt like I was watching a Barely Legal video. When one member of the coven turns 18 on the exact same day his disapproving-of-witchhood parents meet a grisly death, Caleb must figure out whether or not they have a poison apple in the bunch, and if so, how best to go about voting him out of the group. What results is a proudly mediocre mash-up of The Craft and Making the Band. It would all be straight-to-video flotsam if not for the strangely endearing quirks of director Renny Harlin, who's coming off a touch-and-go decade since he was forced to walk the plank over Cutthroat Island. Only Renny would include a scene where two witches are standing toe to toe, about to do battle, and one refers to the other as a "weeyatch."