Universal Pictures opened the second day of CinemaCon with extended looks at five of their major upcoming 2013 releases, including R.I.P.D., 2 Guns, Kick-Ass 2, Despicable Me 2 and Fast & Furious 6.
R.I.P.D., set for release on July 19, stars Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges as deceased police officers who, in the afterlife, are summoned to represent the “Rest in Peace Department,” an organization dedicated to apprehending evil souls hiding out on Earth in an effort to escape judgment.
Primarily a montage of scenes, the footage shows Reynold’s still-living Nick Walker arriving at a massive SWAT raid. He’s killed and suddenly the world is frozen in the middle of the action. He walks through a bullet time environment to the outside world where a swirling vortex is waiting for him in the heavens. Unable to stay behind, Walker is lifted into the mouth of the vortex.
Instead of a heavenly afterlife, Walker is met by Mary-Louise Parker’s Procter, a law enforcement bureaucrat who explains the situation — that Walker is one of the best law enforcement agents that ever lived and that he’d be invaluable as a member of the R.I.P.D. — and then pairs him with another one of history’s greatest lawmen, an old west sheriff, Jeff Bridges’ Roy Pulsipher.
There’s a definite “Men in Black” tone to the film, balancing quite a bit of humor against the action and offering lots of back and forth dialogue between Walker and Pulsipher. One scene has them both attending Walker’s funeral from a distance and Pulsipher, even though he’s trying to calm Walker’s nerves, just talks about how his own funeral was a matter of a coyotes picking apart his skeleton.
One of the repeated gags throughout the film seems to be that, when they’re on Earth, no one sees Walker and Pulsipher as they actually look. Instead, Walker is played by James Hong and Pulsipher is played by Marisa Miller.
“You’ll notice you’re pretty durable,” Pulsipher tells Walker at one point, just before he forces them out the window of a high-rise building. They land just fine, but Walker is annoyed and throws Pulsipher into an oncoming bus as the scene cuts away to the world’s view of a gorgeous blonde woman getting hit.
2 Guns, meanwhile, stars Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg and the footage largely played up their back and forth. At first, both men believe the other to be a criminal but, after they steal $40 million, they learn that they’re both undercover and are somehow being set up. Washington’s Bobby Trench works for the DEA and Wahlberg’s Marcus Stigman is a special forces operative.
Playing over a cover of “All Along the Watchtower,” the footage offered a lot of action and quite a bit of Washington and Wahlberg getting on one another’s nerves.
Moving into Kick-Ass 2, the presentation played up the team aspect of the Jeff Wadlow-directed comic book sequel. In it, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Kick-Ass and Chloe Grace Moretz’s Hit-Girl are approached by a larger community of wannabe superheroes, led by Jim Carrey’s Colonel Stars and Stripes. Carrey plays the part as grinning (but likely unstable) gun nut in makeup that makes him look a good 10 to 15 years older.
“Yeah, there’s a dog on your balls,” he laughs at one point as he sicks his German Shepherd on a bad guy.
While the heroes assemble, however, Christopher Mintz-Plasse is making his own team of villains. Now calling himself The Mother F—er, he vows vengeance against Kick-Ass for what happened to his father in the first film.
The footage led into an intense fight sequence wherein Hit-Girl (not in her costume) is on the roof of a moving van filled with bad guys. They try to shoot her, but she dodges, moving in and around the car, knocking off her foes one by one as the car speeds down the highway.
Next up, Despicable Me 2 offered a solid 20 minutes of footage, opening with Minions gathering on the beach, taking a vacation. Soon an alert sounds, however, and they’re pulled back to Gru’s lair for his next plan which, this time, is throwing a birthday party for Agnes. Outside, it’s an elaborate affair, blending a kid’s party with some trademark Gru touches (piranhas in a fountain and death traps on the jungle gym).
Gru is furious because someone was supposed to show up dressed as a fairy princess and she’s not going to make it. Instead, he dons a pink dress and comes down on a rope, hoisted by Minions, to make it look like he’s flying.
“Why are you so fat?” one girl asks him.
“Because my house is made of candy,” Gru shoots back. “And I eat instead of facing my problems.”
Other parents speak with Gru after, trying to set him up with single women in the neighborhood. He has no interest but there’s a sense that a feminine touch is lacking in the household when one of the little girls has to recite a poem about mothers for class and he realizes that she’s sad because she never had one.
The next day, Gru is approached outside his house by Lucy Wilde (Kristen Wiig), an agent for AVL (Anti Villain League). She shoots him with a lipstick taser and drives off with his unconscious body. Minions follow, but they’re ultimately captured as well as Lucy drives straight off a pier and into the ocean. As soon as she’s underwater, though, the car transforms into a submarine and she meets up with a massive submarine beneath the surface. There, Gru is told that the AVL needs his help. One of the greatest villains of all time has resurfaced and they want his help to stop him.
Named El Macho (and voiced by Al Pacino), the villain in question is a Mexican luchadore who supposedly died “in the most macho way possible.” He rode a shark from a plane and, strapped with 250 pounds of dynamite, rode straight into an active volcano.
There’s another scene a bit later where Lucy and Gru are working together and try to infiltrate El Macho’s lair (guarded by an angry chicken) and another where Gru is practicing asking Lucy out with a Minion dressed as her.
The footage ends with a scene of two Minions getting injected with a purple liquid and transforming into monstrous purple creatures.
Wrapping up with Fast & Furious 6, Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez, Gina Carano, Jordana Brewster and Tyrese Gibson took to the stage to introduce both a footage montage and then an extended action scene from the middle of the May 24 release.
Opening on a tropical island, we find Diesel’s Dom living an ideal life. That’s interrupted when he’s approached by Dwayne Johnson’s Luke Hobbs. He tells Dom that he needs his help to catch a new gang of international car thieves and then shows him a photo of Rodriguez’s Letty.
“Now we work for the Hulk?!” Gibson’s Roman asks as Dom reassembles his team.
There’s a shot of Dom confronting Letty, but she immediately shoots him in the shoulder. In the next scene, we see Walker’s Brian pulling the lead out.
“I’m convinced we’re hunting our evil twins,” Roman says, looking over the faces of the evil car thief team and pointing out that most of them correspond to “Fast & Furious” regulars.
There’s a number of shots of a subway-based hand-to-hand fight scene between Letty and Gina Carano’s Riley, both women tumbling down a flight of stairs in the middle of their fisticuffs.
The montage ends with a confrontation between Dom and Luke Evans’ Owen Shaw, the leader of the evil gang. He tells Dom that the reason he’s not able to full play the game is that he clings to closely to family.
“I’m ready to go any time,” Dom says, “And when I do, I’ll know what I’m doing it for.”
Moving into the extended scene, we see Shaw’s men (with Letty among them) hijacking an armored military caravan on a mountainous highway. They pull up to a massive vehicle and climb aboard, taking it over.
Somewhere else, Hobbs is gathered with a number of men at a law enforcement base and they’re alerted that something is going wrong with the transport. He calls for a chopper.
Back on the highway, Dom and his guys are watching the action and preparing to make a move. Roman goes first, driving along a rocky ridge and shooting a thick steel wire into the cliff face. When the giant military vehicle hits it, it crashes forward, causing an enormous tank to break through it and land on the highway. Shaw and his guys are already inside and the tank begins to move, crushing cars all around it. Sung Kang’s Han and Gal Gadot’s Gisele ride up on motorcycles while Brian and Roman approach in cars.
Shaw winds up crossing the median in the tank while Roman does his best to distract the tank from crushing oncoming cars. The tank moves forward on Roman’s car and he realizes that he’ll be crushed unless he drives fast enough to outrun it. If he goes too fast, though, he’ll be blasted by the tank’s cannon.
Roman spots some extra metal wire in his back seat and, climbing onto the roof of his car, loops it over the tank just as Brian pulls up to save him. The tank fully crushes Roman’s car, but the metal cord is still there, dragging the metal pancake along the highway.
Shaw sends Letty to the roof, telling her to disconnect the wire. We realize he’s planning something grander, though, and clearly wants Dom to see her. Just as Dom pulls up on the opposite side of the highway, the pancake car flips over the side of a bridge, hurling the tank backwards. Letty goes flying and, with no time to think, Dom swerves and jumps, flying out of his own car, straight through the air to catch her.
The presentation concluded with the announcement that Universal has Fast & Furious 7 scheduled for release on July 11, 2014.
