Liam Neeson didn’t invent the “retired professional soldier / operative pulled into one last fight” character or scenario. The damsel in distress wasn’t reinvented or modernized with Taken, nor was the “man on a rampage to find a female loved one” plot device. But for the next few years at minimum, any actor north of 50 making their action genre debut in a movie with the above particular set of plot points is going to get the Liam Neeson comparison. The trailer for this looks reasonably good, but nothing you have to go out of your way to see.
On the more rarely covered movie-related theme park front, a teaser was released this week for Avatar’s Disney Animal Kingdom attraction. I remember this being announced, but honestly had forgotten about it. My feelings toward the Avatar film is that it’s decent enough, neither great nor a travesty, but the visuals were undeniably brilliant. This teaser doesn’t give much to get truly excited about, but James Cameron doesn’t half-ass anything with his name attached to it. For that matter, Disney World doesn’t phone it in either. I expect this to end up being an impressive “replication” of Pandora that even people who didn’t care much for the movie might want to visit.
Earlier in the week, Arkham Knight released a trailer that looked good, but presented a story that was “more of the same” as expected. Here we have the trailer for Mortal Kombat X which follows the same path. Somehow it befits Mortal Kombat. I haven’t even watched someone else play a Mortal Kombat game in several years, much less played it myself, but I’m pretty sure they’re still telling the same story they’ve always told, and what other story would they tell? Apparently one of the key elements in this game is that “Goro lives.” He was presumed dead, I guess? Can a four-armed man-beast from a magical dimension ever be presumed dead?
