Bradley Thomas (Vince Vaughn) doesn’t start fights; he’s “a finisher” who also happens to be psychotic. An ex-boxer and auto mechanic with a penchant for violence, Thomas takes a job as a drug … Continue reading Vince Vaughn electrifies in ‘Brawl in Cell Block 99’
Vince Vaughn got a spot on the walk of fame in Hollywood last year. That’s nice and all but unless that was shit he dipped his hands into, it’s not that great of a moment. Vaughn has been churning out flops for years now, and he is 46 years old.
As a fan of his older work, he has me worried. He has either suddenly become unfunny or is making terrible career choices. His movies aren’t making money or laughs and he looks like he is trying very hard. What happened to the guy who made laugh so hard and fast in Wedding Crashers that my dad and I nearly had to leave the theater to catch our breath? He’s fucking gone and I don’t know when he is coming back.
His latest drivel, 2015’s Unfinished Business, opening to 5 million dollars in 2,777 domestic locations. That’s the kind of dough a small indie makes in several weeks or what Fifty Shades of Grey grossed in an hour. It’s pathetic because Vaughn is talented and as his character has said plenty over the years, “you’re better than this.”
What is the last official good Vaughn flick? Into the Wild in 2007, where he drew upon some of his earlier dramatic work to produce a juicy supporting role as a man who helps Emile Hirsch’s seeker along the way. The Break Up came out a year earlier and got a lot of attention due to Vaughn’s romance with his co-star Jennifer Aniston. It was a very funny film that allowed Aniston to not suck for a change and holds up well on repeat viewings(just watched it on cable last month several times). That was good comedy. Jon Favreau was there and so was Jason Bateman.
It was the end of a fantastic run for Vaughn, one that started with Old School and continued with Starsky and Hutch, Dodgeball, a great role in Mr. and Mrs. Smith and culminated with Crashers. He couldn’t miss then and was so funny. If he was able to unleash his own brand of comedy, the film was better for it. These days, his methods and madness has tamed and gone to crap. Last year’s Internship was especially sad. He co-wrote the film and helped produce it, and the result was a playful if horribly unfunny exercise that made Adam Sandler seem more appealing. The Dilemma opened to 7 million domestically.
Vaughn’s cameo in Anchorman 2, like the entire sequel itself, was overwrought and not funny. It was forced, which is the exact feeling I have when the last 8 years of his work comes to mind. What’s wrong with the guy? Being a Cubs fan always concerns me, but it could be more than that. Maybe, Vaughn likes playing the same loveable lug with a heart of gold and a smart ass mouth. Playing the same guy has suited a man like Jason Statham quite well over the course of his career. He knows exactly what he is and hasn’t strayed. Vaughn was once considered not funny enough when auditioning for Swingers due to his early dramatic work and now he isn’t funny enough to make a shitty script sing for the fans. What gives?
Vaughn may be getting a clue. He took a crucial part in HBO’s True Detective second season this summer, playing a criminal under siege. It’s television but it’s a highly regarded Emmy nominated series with loads of cinematic talent involved. It could be the starting point of something special for Vaughn, because his other 2015 release(The Peter Billingsley directed Term Life) doesn’t look too promising. After the HBO stint, Vaughn should look into a Wedding Crashers or Old School sequel or look into an indie production. Sometimes, you have to go back in order to move forward. Yeah, I just stole a Matthew McConaughey line from a Lincoln car commercial. You see the depths I’m going to in this article. It’s sad. The last chunk of Vince Vaughn’s career has been sad.
Here’s what he has coming up. The drama/comedy Term Life this year followed by roles in Brawl in Cell Block 99, The Archbishop and the Antichrist, and Hacksaw Ridge. Fuck me.
Can he recover it? Who knows. What will it take? Something that thrills us or makes us laugh will do. The good thing about the movies is a comeback story can happen at any age and the audiences is always waiting to celebrate it.
The bad news is Vince Vaughn is turning into Adam Sandler real quick. Stop it dude.
(In case you missed it on KSDK)
Picture yourself ordering a big juicy ribeye steak and you get a dried up bland T-bone steak cooked by a cook who hates his job. That’s what I got after 8 hours of heavy handed drama on HBO’s season 2 of True Detective. The finale stunk up the room and it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. How did golden boy Nic Pizzolatto round up all this talent and mess this up? Next time, Nic, buy a diaper and unload in that instead of all over people who pay top dollar for HBO and went into this summer expecting something better.
I gave this season time to grow on me. Think of spending a few hours with a VERY serious kid at a playground. He’s cool and wants to have fun but can’t stop talking about philosophical meanings and boring layered narratives. That’s True Detective in 2015. Overwrought and overcooked and just too much in the end. Worst of all, its creator lost his compass. Pizzolatto can write twisty seedy stories about the rugged battles we fight within our subconscious on a daily basis but believe me he had better than this assortment of characters running around with their heads cut off in the middle of this mystery plot.
Hey, there’s Vince Vaughn, trying to recover some dignity from a career that fell straight down the soft comedy rabbit hole. Vaughn was trained on theater and came up in Hollywood through dramas like Clay Pigeons and Return to Paradise. What happened to that magnetic presence from Swingers? Vaughn was miscast here as a former criminal trying to go straight and a stupid one at that. He couldn’t handle the dialogue and never seemed comfortable except for a handful of scenes. Maybe he bit down too hard on the comedy bug or maybe he wasn’t meant for this gym class.
Look at Taylor Kitsch, playing the most doomed closeted gay cop of all time. So serious, never smiling and tormented beyond belief. The main recipe this season was inner torture. Look at me, I am pale, unhappy and out of cigarettes. Show pity on me. Taylor’s Paul, an ex-soldier trying to ride a patrol bike who gets sucked into this crime investigation set to explode. He never seemed right for the job, the same way the actor never knew quite how to play his character. When he found his step, it was overacting. So visible and forced.
Same for Rachel McAdams, the beautiful talented actress who is working so much right now she may need a break. Sometimes, when actors work at much as she has in the past year, I wonder if they don’t know how to handle a big role like this. Her overprotective, damaged, knife wielding badge started out like someone we could like in a dirty cool way, but quickly her character boiled too much and the goods spilled out. By the end of Sunday’s finale, I really didn’t care what happened to her character because I never felt like I knew her.
Colin Farrell’s Ray was the only character I felt had a complete base to work off of. A cop whose wife was brutally raped, a crime that set Ray off on a revenge trail that left him thinking he had killed his wife’s attacker but spending the rest of his life not sure if his son was really his. Farrell adopted this deep slightly Southern drawl and assortment of plaid shirts and funky facial hair to rip into Ray. It was like his Miami Vice character went to Texas and came back a changed much more tormented dude. A sad one but a character we cared about. Farrell can visually project 80 emotions on his face but in the end, the showrunners did him wrong, at least in my eyes. They walked him into a trap. I didn’t expect characters to find happiness at the end, but I expected they’d read something better than what they found.
One character needed his comeuppance and didn’t get it. You’ll know if you watch.
Season 1 was brilliant because it had a sexy confidence, was extremely well written and felt fresh and rightfully gloomy. People were sad, drinking too much, way too violent, but they had a purpose throughout the misery. The season had a vibe and a pulse. It was a wild guitar solo that seemed to last for 7 hours before encore sprung this culmination of all the plot threads. It also had a white hot can’t go wrong Matthew McConaughey meeting the character of a lifetime in Rust Cohle. A man who preached about a flat circle. Maybe Pizzolatto should have stuck with that circle and brought him back, along with Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart.
To me, the biggest missing element from Season 2 was a foil for the seriousness of the main characters. Season 1 balanced McConaughey’s madness and wrenching monologues with the bewildered humor and light presence of Harrelson. Season 2 was missing a Woody Harrelson. Something to balance all the depressed folks out. Too bad.
Another missing element from Season 2 was director Cary Fukunaga, a maverick world creator from Season 1 who turned Louisiana’s swamp into a gothic lost and found crime zone. The rift between him and Pizzolatto split the marriage they shared via True Detective and deprived Season 2’s players of a great director. Without his compass(Fukunaga’s camera), Pizzolatto was lost this go around.
Maybe Season 3 brings back Cohle and Hart. Go back to what worked and what put you on the map, Nic. Season 2 found you without a purpose. Season 2 felt like leftovers in a broken refrigerator. It was the little brother trying to be as cool as the older star athlete and coming up short. Maybe fans were set up to be disappointed.
True Detective Season 2 tried to go big with a larger cast and wide spreading mystery plot. It misfired, badly. You can go back and watch it again, and I’m sure the effect wouldn’t be better. Only worse.
Nice try, Pizzolatto. Next time, find a worthy story, characters worth caring about and something fresh. Take some time my friend. You need it after that strikeout.
In the meantime, go catch up on Cinemax’s Banshee, a show that DOES NOT disappoint. Like ever.
Welcome to True Detective, where everybody has a dark past, is full of white hot rage and feels like punching someone several times. There are no clean cut square characters in creator Nic Pizzolatto’s HBO landscape of broken souls, messy personalities and anger management blues. Everybody is guilty. It just matters how far they have plunged down the rabbit hole of regret.
Pizzolatto staked himself to a career of cool guy nods and free seats at any restaurant in Hollywood when he crawled up inside Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle last year in the debut season of the HBO drama. Ever since he threw that batting practice fastball to the actor who couldn’t miss at the moment, everything is different. Nic changed things. The expectations raised. The main cast members doubled and the plot thickened.
Season 2 takes place in LA, the city of seriously deranged angels. Three different law officers(Colin Farrell, Rachel McAdams, and Taylor Kitsch) come together on a dead body on a piece of land that may cause a stir for a career criminal(Vince Vaughn) trying to go businessman legit. Nothing goes as planned. A premium cable drama doesn’t walk a straight line. Think of a storyteller going over all the daily vitamins for success. Darkness, bad deeds, corruption, extortion and more murder follow the next seven episodes.
Let’s go down the main characters one by one, like a viewer sitting down with each person at an interrogation table with two 60 watt bulbs flashing in their face. (more…)
Dose of Buffa 