What went right
The late 90s/early 2000s. You had a hot streak that included LA Confidential, The Insider, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind and Master and Commander. But your bulldog charisma enabled you to ride out the subsequent flops and embarrassments (A Good Year, Robin Hood, The Man with the Iron Fists, Winter’s Tale). That difficulty with accents notwithstanding, your stature has meant you can afford to reserve yourself for classy name directors – the unorthodox take on the Noah story from Darren Aronofsky being a recent risky example. That worked out pretty well, even if the film itself got a kicking from evangelical Christians. Another one that just about paid off was warming your pipes in the film of Les Misérables, and congrats on stepping into Marlon Brando’s shoes as Superdaddy Jor-El in Man of Steel.
What went wrong
Your hair-trigger bad temper didn’t help. Were some of those soppy roles an attempt to mitigate the damage? They didn’t work. Films such as Tenderness and The Next Three Days did zip for your profile, and no one expects that to change after the upcoming Fathers and Daughters, a strategically buried weepie. Then your passion project: The Water Diviner, which you directed as well as starred in. Yep, it refocused some attention on the price paid by Anzac forces during the first world war. But it didn’t position you as a master behind the camera.
What you should do next
You’re already heading back to your comfort zone with The Nice Guys, a 70s set thriller in which you investigate a missing girl. Stop with the sappiness: you’ve never been able to pull it off. What you need is something that reminds people why you were so great in the first place, another hard-as-nails lone warrior type. Aim for an ambitious, ultraviolent film that breaks out of the genre straitjacket, with a really out-there director on board.
Did you get a sniff of The Revenant? If not, that’s the kind of thing you should bust a gut to be part of. Try displacing Leonardo DiCaprio in the affections of the likes of Martin Scorsese. Could you pull off a space film, a la Matt Damon in The Martian? Possibly not, unless it called for intense, flawed humanity rather than chipper can-do spirit. But it’s worth thinking about for In Sand and Blood, in which you play a seaman stranded on a desolate African coast. Another boxing movie could work the magic, or a proper war movie, along the lines of Fury. Something tough, anyway.
More in this series
There’s something about you, Cameron Diaz - here’s how to recapture it
No more directing, Russell Crowe, or going soppy
A titanic Von Trier meltdown could get you back on track, Kate Winslet
Hey, Ryan Gosling, you’ve given girls advice, now let us return the favour
You need discipline, Nicolas Cage. Call Michael Haneke!
