I was disappointed by Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd, which gave a realistic depiction of CIA spies. By “realistic” we mean “boring.” The movie was just slow and, while I appreciate the realism De Niro showed, and some of the performances were interesting, it just wasn’t a movie I could dig into and enjoy, and it’s not a film I’ve felt like revisiting. De Niro is all about revisiting the movie, however, and is back to talking about creating two more Good Shepherd pictures.
While at the Karlovy Film Festival over the weekend, De Niro weighed in on the pending SAG strike and talked about his desire to make two more pictures about Matt Damon’s passive hero Edward Wilson. If made, the first sequel would bump action into the late Cold War Era (1989), and a third film would move to present day. Considering Damon’s character only got interesting as he got older, I’d much rather just see us jump to the third picture and let him be a curmudgeonly old man reminiscing of his days as a younger spy when hours would go by with nothing happening at all.
De Niro told Variety that he wasn’t currently researching information for the sequels, but his trip to central Europe gave him the opportunity to think about the material again. Here’s hoping De Niro will think about it during his Europe trip and then return to Hollywood and forget about The Good Shepherd all over again. At least the actor plans to collaborate with Martin Scorsese a couple more times, which generally yields better results than De Niro’s spy drama.
