LOSING THEIR LUSTRE
Jamie Portman explores whether returning to a franchise can salvage a dying Hollywood career.
Lindsay Lohan wants to salvage what’s left of her career by doing a big-screen sequel to Mean Girls, a movie she made 13 years ago.
But what really emerges from her recent comments in a CNN Facebook Live interview is desperation.
There was a time when she seemed to be the brightest and smartest of Hollywood’s latest crop of teenage stars. But that was before she went off the rails both personally and professionally. Now, pathetically, she’s latched onto the idea of a new Mean Girls as a way of restarting her life.
Lohan is not the only Hollywood star clinging to the rubble of a career and seeking to rescue it by going the sequel route. Johnny Depp and Eddie Murphy are two others whose lustre is fading and who are now attempting to prove that you can go home again.
But Lohan seems particularly fragile as she pursues her quest for redemption.
Within two years of her 2004 triumph in Mean Girls, producer James G. Robinson was accusing Lohan of “discourteous, irresponsible and unprofessional” behaviour during the filming of Georgia Rules. And much worse was to come. Now there’s this dream of mending a ravaged life by revisiting Mean Girls. She’s written her own treatment for a sequel and is determined that producer Lorne Michaels and screenwriter Tina Fey, the people behind the original movie, take it on. Trouble is — she’s no longer Cady Heron, the memorably resilient teenager surviving the shark-tank culture of highschool cliquery. She’s a 30-yearold actress who looks older than her years and hasn’t been on the big screen since she went topless in The Canyons in 2013.
Depp and Murphy may be in less dire straits, but they can scarcely claim A-list status these days. However, they’re also in more favourable situations in disinterring franchises whose successes essentially stemmed from their original involvement.
Depp recently returned to the mincing mannerisms of Captain Jack Sparrow to film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. The movie, now in post-production, gets a major release later this year, and Disney is no doubt in clover, remembering how Depp’s outrageous characterization managed to triumph over the incoherence and idiocies of its four predecessors and bring in the dollars.
But the irony for Depp is that Pirates seems to be his only safe career haven these days. Recently Forbes magazine named him Hollywood’s most overpaid actor for a second year in a row, contrasting his high salaries with a succession of financial flops — among them, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Mortdecai, The Tourist, The Lone Ranger and Transcendence.
We also have Murphy, soon to turn 56, revisiting the character of smartass copper Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop IV. It’s been 33 years since the first Beverly Hills Cop landed on the big screen and elevated Murphy to superstar status. It’s been 23 years since Beverly Hills Cop III premièred to devastating reviews, landed on Hollywood’s Golden Raspberry list, and ended up with markedly diminished revenues in comparison with its forerunners.
Murphy has not managed his career well, and his paranoia toward the media has been a further impediment. His bad choices have yielded a load of stinkers that include Golden Child, Daddy Day Care, Pluto Nash, and the execrable, misogynist Harlem Nights, a vanity project he also directed. To be sure, he enlivened the Shrek cartoons as the voice of a motor-mouthed donkey.
Now in middle age, he’s seeking to relive his youthful triumphs in the Beverly Hills Cop movies. But can he pull it off? There’s a problem here — one that was recognized as long ago as 1990 by filmmaker Walter Hill in a conversation with Postmedia. Hill had directed an early Eddie success, 48 Hours, and years later returned to work with Murphy in its sequel.
“The one thing that cannot be reproduced this time is that incredible sense of discovery of a new star in the constellation,” Hill said glumly. “I felt we had lightning in a bottle. Well, you can’t ‘discover’ Eddie again ... The first time Eddie was a kid. Now he’s an institution.”
Today, Murphy is at best an aging institution who has lost his star power and sees Axel Foley as a possible elixir of survival.
The bottom line is that Hollywood’s devotion to sequels and franchises can be misplaced. In truth they’re something of a crap shoot. Some franchises ultimately don’t need star power. That’s the case with The Fast and the Furious films. It’s also true of Star Wars. But sometimes, an actor seems inseparable from the franchise. Harrison Ford spent two decades vowing he’d never make another Indiana Jones movie. But then, his star starting to fade, he was back in Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.