Hoo boy. Buckle in, because this is…upsetting.
Right off the heels of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s death, it’s been announced that he’ll be played in a biopic by Jared Leto. Hmm, that didn’t seem so bad, let’s see what else Variety is saying about it:
Brett Ratner is attached to direct the film.
Yikes. There go any chances this film had of being any good. (Variety goes on to say that the film is currently untitled, as if there’s any chance in hell it won’t be called Playboy.) Full disclosure: I’m a fan of Ratner’s Red Dragon, probably because it’s one of my favorite books and I never got the hype surrounding Manhunter. But this is in incredibly tone-deaf choice: take a man like Hefner, with an incredibly complicated legacy, and make a movie about him directing by a sentient frat-boy caricature once called “the biggest sleaze” in Hollywood. In Hollywood, people.
Beyond that, there’s Leto. I think he’s a decent actor who got an Oscar for a very Oscar-y performance. Which is fine; the Academy doesn’t bat a thousand or even close to it. But what that Oscar told him was that he could do whatever he wants and get rewarded for it; it didn’t tell him to commit even more to his craft, or to take chances, it said “Here’s your permission slip for everything.” Imagine someone without an Oscar pulling all the crap he did on the set of Suicide Squad.
It’s easy (and fun) to pass judgment on a film that we haven’t seen. But this is, even for Hollywood, an incredibly poor marriage of actor, director, and subject matter. A Hefner movie was unavoidable, but why does it have to be this one? Why not cast James Franco as Hefner again? Sure, Franco sleepwalked through Lovelace, but any viewer of The Deuce will confirm that Franco is a serious fucking actor now. I imagine we’ll see sometime in 2018 just how tWi$t3d Leto’s take on Hefner is.
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