With Tron Legacy poised to eviscerate our eyeballs, it's never seemed like a better time for studios to raid their back catalogs and turn their most iconic movies into franchises. Sure, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps didn't exactly set the box office on fire, but, to be fair, it was a movie about banking. And why make a movie about a street when you can make one about a highway... to the danger zone? That's right, Paramount is supposedly looking to make a sequel to Top Gun, and they may even get original director Tony Scott to direct. Sure, the sequel could end up focusing on computer techs who pilot drone planes by remote-control (which should make for an interesting beach volleyball scene), but Tom Cruise would still be front and center, ready to sing a little karaoke. With that news, we'd like to see Cruise revisit most of his iconic '80s and '90s roles -- here are some sequels that we want to see.

Old people are hilarious, for a variety of reasons. They get bored easily. They like things that are out of style. They can't do things for themselves anymore. They place less value on human life. And they will kill you without a moment's consideration. At least, these are the things that I've learned about them from the movies, which are always pulling them out of retirement for one last job, be it a bank heist or an art heist or one last case or to avenge some cut-up prostitute in the Wild West. And while RED is no Unforgiven -- the characters in the movies similarly seek no forgiveness, nor do they seem to possess any -- it is endlessly entertaining, and features some of the most hyper-violent senior citizens you will find outside of Japanese animation.

It's actually starting to get difficult to remember a time when Ben Affleck was a punchline, following his dismal performance in Daredevil, his string of forgettable action films like Paycheck and Reindeer Games and the despised Gigli. Since 2004, he's been taking mostly serious lead roles, and his appearances in less-respected fare were mostly smaller, comedic cameos. And after winning acclaim for his directorial debut, Gone, Baby, Gone, it seemed like he had found a new fallback career if this acting thing didn't work out. Well, Affleck directs and stars in The Town, and while it's mostly the familiar ground he walked in previous Boston dramas like Gone and Good Will Hunting, and it has its moments of silliness, it's a pretty solid heist movie, with a bunch of great actors and enough wicked Bahston accents to fill Fenway Pahk.

Robert Rodriguez's original trailer for Machete, kicking off 2007's double-feature Grindhouse, is perfection. It paints a picture of a world where Danny Trejo's Machete is a Shaft-level icon, a lover of women and killer of men who stars in an action movie with enough sex and violence to melt your face off. But in trying to create a real movie that incorporated all of the footage from that fake trailer, Rodriguez seems to have hit a snag. He had so many scenes to include and so many actors he wanted to add to the mix that the movie turned into an unwieldy, overcomplicated mess that's more parody than homage. The original trailer seems to portray a more serious film with a more stripped-down purpose, and while that fictional movie doesn't appear to have the involvement of Steven Seagal, Jessica Alba or Don Johnson, it may be a superior work to its current, real-life counterpart.

With a title like The American (the book it's based on is called A Very Private Gentleman), I expected this movie to be one big metaphor for how the U.S. is perceived abroad, especially since the title character is an assassin by trade, hiding out among simple Italian townspeople. And maybe it is: Clooney's butterfly-admiring killer Jack barely speaks the language (though he knows enough to get by), he takes things without paying for them (though he offers), his presence leads to innocent deaths (though not by his hand) and he takes advantage of the town's young women (though, to be fair, that's their job). But the only time Americans are really spoken of in generalities is when a priest tells Jack that Americans are always trying to escape their history. Jack may be, although his deeper past is never brought up, but we do know one thing: he's definitely still dealing with his last trip to Sweden.

It's a shame that Takers was delayed as much as it was. Maybe if it had come out a few years ago, like it was supposed to, it wouldn't have been preposterously compared to The Expendables, the movie it's supposed to knock out of the number-one spot this weekend. But director John Luessenhop's (Lockdown) son got sick five years ago, and cast members Tyrese Gibson and Terrence Howard moved on to other things, and once the producers finally pulled everything together and made the movie, rapper and star T.I. was arrested on weapons charges, pushing back the release date. (The arrest of co-star Chris Brown may have further delayed it.) So now we've got a movie with the smell of age on it, and the sharks are in the water. But, while it's not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, it has some great moments, and is a lot better than I thought it would be. Here are just a few of the things that make this bare-bones heist movie worth seeing.

If you've seen any of director Neil Marshall's films -- Dog Soldiers, The Descent, Doomsday -- you've been looking forward to this movie, whether you know it or not. The man does great horror and over-the-top action, so the idea of yet another movie from him about characters in hostile territory, fighting for survival, seems like a sure-fire winner. And, man, Centurion is that.

It's almost impossible not be disappointed by the experience of actually watching The Expendables. It just promises too much! It's the Snakes on a Plane of South American dictators' castles being blown to hell by everybody's childhood favorites and six tons of C-4, you know? But I still enjoyed it, even if didn't melt my face off in exactly the ways I wanted it to.

By now, it seems everyone in the world must know the plot of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: in order to date the girl of his dreams, Scott must engage in physical combat with her seven evil exes. What follows is a tournament-style series of battles, as the exes become more powerful, and Scott has to use more advanced fighting techniques -- swords, bass guitars, amplifiers, etc. -- to defeat them. And while the video game references and supernatural aspects transform the film into something else entirely, at its heart it's still a fight movie, which automatically makes us think about all the great fight movies we've seen over the years. Here are some of the awesomest ones that give Scott Pilgrim a run for its money.

Fans and detractors of director Zack Snyder have long been looking forward to seeing what the geeky auteur can do when he's not adapting other people's material. He successfully updated Dawn of the Dead, faithfully re-created the comic-book worlds of 300 and Watchmen, and even his upcoming animated owl picture Legend of the Guardians is based on a children's book, so the idea of an original Zack Snyder joint had fans salivating and haters waiting. Well, the wait is over, and the first trailer for Zack Snyder's self-penned Sucker Punch has been released, and while it certainly is eye-catching, it doesn't look terribly original. It looks like he took a dozen existing movies, put them in a blender and hit "Puree." Granted, it still looks pretty tasty to a movie freak like me, but the film's tag line, "You will be unprepared"? If you've seen any of these movies, you just might be prepared after all.