In perhaps the most confounding movie news of the year, it has been reported that Mel Gibson and Sean Penn will co-star in a film about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.
As blockbuster comeback vehicles go, this is a bit of a head-scratcher. It’s hard to think of a less exciting subject for a movie than a couple of men writing a dictionary, or two people less suitable to star in it than Sean Penn and Mel Gibson. After all, dictionaries are rational and methodical, and Sean Penn and Mel Gibson are neither of those things. Surly and bad-tempered, they’ve both have been in trouble with the law, are notoriously volatile and tend to fill their directorial work with off-puttingly heavy-handed preachiness.
The film makes a little more sense when you learn that Penn will be playing WC Minor – a man who submitted 10,000 entries from a psychiatric hospital and then chopped his own penis off – but it still seems like an odd place to point these actors. So, here are other films that Penn and Gibson should make together instead.
Lethal Weapon 5
Roger Murtaugh is found murdered in a quarry. The loss of his friend draws Martin Riggs (Gibson) back from the wilderness. He is in bad shape: red-eyed and drunk, and convinced that the Jewish race is responsible for every major conflict in the history of mankind. Worse still, his new partner is an angry, monosyllabic detective played by Penn. Can they put aside their differences and solve the murder? Will Penn respond to Riggs’s jokes with anything but simmering rage? Will Riggs be legally allowed to drive a car? Probably not.
The El Chapo Encounter
The movie adaptation of Sean Penn’s seminal 2016 Rolling Stone essay El Chapo Speaks. Penn plays the fearless reporter Sean Penn, a man given to beginning articles with Montaigne quotes and then filling the rest of them with distracted anecdotes about urination and his inability to use laptops properly. Gibson plays El Chapo, the world’s most notorious drug lord turned giddy Sean Penn fanboy. It’s the next Frost/Nixon, if Frost/Nixon had mainly been about how great Sean Penn is.
Mad Max: Ghosted
Returning to the role that made him famous, Gibson plays Max Rockatansky: a man with the thankless task of driving across the dystopian ravages of post-apocalyptic Australia, dodging vicious motorcycle gangs and hordes of fantastical mercenaries, solely to track down Imperator Furiosa and ask her why she won’t talk to Sean Penn any more.
Whatever Happened to Baby Mel?
Mel Gibson and Sean Penn play two actors past their prime, bitterly convalescing in an abandoned Hollywood mansion. Once the bigger name of the two, Gibson finds himself consumed with jealousy at the cheque that Penn just picked up for grunting six times in The Angry Birds Movie. A cat-and-mouse game of psychological torture follows, with Penn taunting Gibson about The Beaver and Gibson alienating Penn by only communicating in ancient Aramaic. The film ends with the pair of them, drunk on a beach, being arrested for murder while they re-enact their most famous scenes. (Respectively, the closing monologue from 21 Grams and the bit from Chicken Run when Gibson gets in an oven and says: “It’s like an oven in here.”)
