What the hell happened to John Cusack. I just can’t figure this guy out anymore. Is he a total sellout, or does he genuinely care about making good movies? He seems to try to change it up, alternating big budget movies with more actor friendly, risky indies, but most of the indies end up being terrible or if they’re good like Grace is Gone, everyone ignores them. And his big budget movies have been a special kind of bad. Offensively bad. Just thinking of America’s Sweethearts still makes me want to vomit. I’ll give him 1408, but it’s an island of tolerable in an island of ignored or intolerable films.
This weekend Cusack has War, Inc. coming out, one of those risky indies which everyone seems to hate. So now he’s changing it up by making a big budget movie, which we will also all almost certainly hate. HR says he’s considering signing with master of disastrously bad disaster films Roland Emmerich.
Hey I like Independence Day and Stargate too, but what have you done for me lately Emmerich? 10,000 B.C.? The Core? Don’t get me started on Day After Tomorrow and those crummy CGI wolves. Emmerich is a disaster, and he’s inflicted more suffering on moviegoers in recent years than just about anyone. Now Cusack, who could really use a hit, is considering throwing himself into his clutches. Am I the only one that feels kind of bad for the guy? He deserves better, if only for giving the world High Fidelity.
The Emmerich movie which Cusack may end up in is 2012, and it would have him playing a divorced dad, part-time writer/part-time limo driver named Jackson Curtis, facing down a global cataclysm which wipes out the world. He’ll be heroic in some way and set off to save his family. Basically, it’s the plot of every bad Roland Emmerich movie. He has one script. It’s only the CGI that changes.
Also involved in the film and much too good for it is Chiwetel Ejiofor as an obligatory science advisor. Ejiofor is a guy who probably deserves to have at least three Oscars by now. You might have seen him in Serenity, where he was one of the best ever villains on screen. Or maybe you saw him in Talk to Me, where he played an underrated second banana to Don Cheadle’s more showy radio host character. But you probably didn’t see him in Kinky Boots, since no one saw Kinky Boots. A shame, since damn it’s good.
Roland Emmerich is not good, and even actors as good as Ejiofor and Cusack have no hope of doing anything to better one of his movies. There’s no room for actors in them, they’re all CG and artifice. Casting the likes of Ejiofor and Cusack is a waste, nearly as much of a waste as paying to see any recent Emmerich movie.
