Faster
Directed by George Tillman, Jr.
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Carla Gugino, and Maggie Grace
Castle Rock Entertainment/CBS Films
Release date: November 24, 2010

The ads for Faster would lead you to believe that the film is a simple action movie with a revenge plot, a concept that has been used since the early days of cinema. However, Faster is a revenge plot with more twists and turns than a NASCAR race. Former WWE wrestler Dwayne Johnson plays the character known only as Driver. We see him being released from prison. During his “exit interview,” the warden shows pictures of wounded inmates that crossed his path. This sequence cleverly establishes Driver’s “badassery” and foreshadows the carnage to come. Driver and his brother pulled a bank robbery, but someone close to them set them up to be robbed by another group of criminals. Driver’s brother is murdered while he survives the robbery and goes to jail. While in prison, Driver has had people keeping tabs on the men involved in his brother’s killing. Almost immediately upon release, Driver begins exacting vengeance on these people. In the beginning, Driver is a remorseless killing machine, drawing the attention of Detective Cicero (Carla Gugino), who reluctantly teams up with Cop (Billy Bob Thornton) to track down Driver and end his killing spree.

Back in July, the first teaser trailer for Zack Snyder‘s visual spectacle, Sucker Punch, was unleashed upon the world, leading everyone to wonder if it could keep up with all of the insanity it promised.

Now comes the movie’s first full trailer, giving us a much better idea of what the film is about while piling on even more visual insanity — as hard as that might be to believe!

The movie is about a group of girls who are locked up in a mental institution in Vermont who travel deep within their own subconscious to attempt to try and escape their prison. The storyline basically allows Snyder — who has previously delivered visually stunning fare in 300, Watchmen, and Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole — the opportunity to play around in a sandbox consisting of every genre known to man…something that could be very, very good for we the watchers.

Be sure to click on over to the other side now to read a full synopsis and check out the full trailer now!

The trailer for Zack Snyder‘s Sucker Punch has been released.

Watch it here below.

Also, six character posters were released, which you can see here below (click images for larger, full view).

The trailer is a shorter version of the footage that Snyder debuted this past weekend at the San Diego Comic-Con, which opened to sequences hauntingly backed by Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks.” [Read SDCC 2010: Zack Snyder’s “˜Sucker Punch’ Panel for description of the extended footage.]

The extended footage was much more captivating than this trailer, which runs about 1 1/2 minutes, so if this doesn’t grab you right away, don’t give up on it just yet.

Director Zack Snyder and his cast of Sucker Punch, his follow-up to his successful Watchmen adaptation, was on hand for the Warner Bros panel at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con.

Snyder noted that, with his co-writer, he’d been working on the story for 8 years. He was motivated by the desire to create an original property “not based on a breakfast cereal or superglue, or anything like that.”

He then introduced the panel which included Carla Gugino, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Jena Malone, and Emily Browning.

Browning plays Baby Doll, whose mother dies, and is placed by her father in an insane asylum to be lobotomized and needs to discover a way to escape, if only through the world inside her mind. Hudgens plays Blondie, who fires some of the biggest guns in the film. Malone plays Rocket, who rallies the troops toward the idea of escape. Chung plays Amber, who’s loyal to Baby Doll. Gugino plays Polish psychiatrist Dr. Gorski, a dominatrix/choreographer/madame-type.

Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter & Under the Hood
DVD, Blu-ray, VoD
Directed by Mike Smith & Daniel DelPurgatorio (Black Freighter)/Eric Matthies (Under the Hood)
Starring Gerard Butler, Stephen McHattie, Carla Gugino
Warner Home Entertainment
Release date: March 24, 2009

And you thought we were done with our Watchmen coverage? Well Warner Brothers has a few more dimes they can squeeze out of the property, so now we get a stand-alone DVD release of a couple of glorified special features. Is this disc worth buying, especially knowing that the animated section of this disc will be on the eventual DVD release of Watchmen? I’d say yes, if you’re a big fan of the book or the movie (or, like me, both). More casual fans will probably be okay waiting for these to be included when the regular movie comes out on DVD.

The good thing to say about this is that the two features here — Tales of the Black Freighter and Under The Hood — are both very well done. First you get the main draw of the disc, the animated feature Tales of the Black Freighter. Readers of the book will know what this is, but for those who haven’t read the book, the Black Freighter is a pirate comic that is told in conjunction with the main story and serves as an allegory for those events. It the story of a captain (voiced by Gerard Butler) whose ship is attacked by the titular Black Freighter, and then must struggle to get to his home before the freighter crew kills his family.