Adrienne Palicki | Through the Shattered Lens

I usually have a good idea of upcoming action films once they’ve been announced into production, but I have to admit that Keanu Reeve’s upcoming action film, John Wick, has been quite the ninja. I’ve not heard one thing about this project until I came across the just released trailer earlier today.

The trailer itself pretty much lays out what looks like a basic premise for the film. The title character seems to be some sort of retired badass who is brought out of it to get his revenge on the idiots who killed his cute little dog (given to him by his dying wife) during a home invasion robbery.

I know there are many whose brain starts to wander and/or seize up whenever they hear the name Keanu Reeves. I, fortunately, am not one of those people and I actually think that Reeves has been much-maligned throughout his career. For one thing he does seem to handle action scenes pretty well and this trailer for John Wick just continues to reinforce that thought.

John Wick will be setting wrongs right and bringing killer of dogs their just due this October 24, 2014.

I will admit right here and right now that I really enjoyed G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra when it came out in 2009. I know that it was really panned by critics and many film-goers, but I thought it brought the cartoonish action of the original cartoon to life. I wasn’t too thrilled with some of the casting choices, but overall I had fun with the film. I wasn’t really the only one who enjoyed it since it made quite enough in the box-office to warrant a sequel. This sequel looks to bring in only a few people from the first film (Channing Tatum, Ray Park and Lee Byung-hun as Duke, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow respectively) while bringing in a new cast and, most important of all, a new director and writers.

Jon Chu, fresh off the success of Fast Five, took on this project and from the trailer shown above it looks like he has injected the very same fun action he did for the Fast and the Furious franchise. It’s going to be interesting to see if the action in this sequel follows the same cartoonish (lasers and stuff) kind they had in the first film or will Chu and crew go old-school action and just go with bullets, bombs and rockets. If they go with the latter then I am all for it. Plus, it has “The Rock” as Roadblock. That alone had me as ticket-buyer on Day One of it’s release.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation is set for a June, 29, 2012 release.