He’s an in shape handsome guy but not built. It won’t be a big problem to play someone poor and skinny.
He starred in the recent (remake? sequel?) of Twister. He was in Top Gun 2 playing the role that took the place of Iceman. He starred in Devotion which deserved to be seen by more people.
He’s still the acting equivalent of a plank of wood. But maybe I’m wrong and he’s actually the next Daniel Day Lewis, hiding his talent up until this dramatic banger of a film.
Stranger
Ah. Haven’t seen any of those.
He’s ok in the rom com Anyone But You with Sydney Sweeney where they play two charmless pretty people forced back together at a wedding after a date went badly due to poor communication skills.
You are selling him like steaming hot split pea soup on a sweltering summer heat wave. At least throw in an ice cube or two.
Stranger
Oh so you also read the review in ‘Variety’!
I think I saw that movie back in the mid-Nineties with…Cameron Diaz and Alicia Silverstone(?), with Dylan Delmonty as the non-descript handsome male lead with a perpetual five o’clock shadow. Or maybe I just imagined it in a fever dream along with Kevin Spacey once being well-regarded as a talented actor who people wanted to work with.
Stranger
It’s a Much Ado About Nothing adaptation. Sweeney and Powell have plenty of charisma to make it an entertaining watch.
Well, then I’ll have to give it a watch on a day where I have nothing better to do and the planet is imminently collapsing into a wandering black hole.
Stranger
To humor you, I watched a few clips of the movie, and without hyperbole I can say that based on those scenes Glenn Powell and Sydney Sweeney are two of the most charisma-deficient actors I have ever seen in a rom-com, albeit not aided by dialogue that wasn’t so much painful as just narratively incoherent and remotely lacking in anything a competent screenwriter would call “humor” but which I sure met some algorithmic definition of the concept.
I can hate-watch How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days because even though it is an awful story with narcissistic villains as the protagonists, Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey have genuine chemistry and also know what kind of film they are in so they vamp it up whenever possible to play into what terrible people their characters are. As much as I hate Love, Actually in nearly every possible way, it has a fantastic cast that does everything they can do with the dreck material. And those Nora Ephron comedies that were so popular in the ‘Nineties made me want to scrape the top layer of skin off my entire body after watching, (especially the uber-creepy and badly dated You’ve Got Mail) but Ephron could write dialogue that actors like Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan (and the underappreciated Parker Posey in a role so fundamentally evil they should have given her a cigarette holder and a fur coat made from Dalmatians) can dine out on all week.
This movie? It’s evidence that the chatbot and/or aspiring 12 year old writer that generated the screenplay (because there I find it impossible to believe that a professional screenwriter would generate dialogue this terrible as this even if they allowed their name to be put on it) is not ready for prime time, or even public access, and the leads have no native charisma to carry whatever story there is here. It is all the worse for being purportedly based on Much Ado About Nothing, but unsurprising because modernized adaptations of Shakespeare comedies often stumble when trying to express the Bard’s wit without his words, and I have a hard time thinking of any Shakespeare-based romantic comedy (other than straight adaptations like Joss Whedon’s 2012 self-financed film using the original text) that have really worked. On the other hand, I eagerly await the days that that the Coen Brothers decide to do an updated retooling of Hamlet or Macbeth because the dark humor in those plays matches their sensibilities so well.
Stranger
That should have been this clip:
This is my favorite JCVD film! The combination of peak-cocaine Van Damme and John Woo before Hollywood told him to stop doing all the crazy things that they were so excited about when they brought him over the ocean is a testosterone-and-steroid-crazed movie that makes no sense, and Jean-Claude is an even less believable former Force Recon Cajon merchant seaman than he was a was the leader of a 1920s pickpocket gang cum expert Muay Thai fighter. I hope it is steaming somewhere because I’m going to watch it tonight, and the Blockbuster down the street has been closed for, like, forever, man!
Stranger
Game Night? Is that a foreign movie because you can’t mean the Jason Bateman movie as being in this genre?
Possibly a stretch. But I seemed to remember their game night ended up getting pulled into a real life “murder mystery”.
Ready or Not might be a better addition to the list.
Those would be great even if they star Glen Powell!
More likely: Oscar Isaac and Michael Stuhlbarg.
Having forgotten:
Starring Denzel Washington; no role for Mr. Powell. Historical era, not modern re-telling, but its existence may mean the Coens are less-likely to do a modern re-telling.
Both are lamentably too old for the role of Hamlet but Oscar Isaac would make a fantastic Macbeth. I’d have to think about Stuhlbarg; his most obvious casting would be as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice but I feel he’s got enough range to do a lot of things, especially the other ‘problem plays’. I have a fondness for Measure for Measure, so maybe the Duke.
I didn’t even know about this (haven’t been following movie release since the pandemic and don’t have Apple+) but I’ll have to check this out!
Stranger
He might even be better as Angelo. But yes, OI would be a great candidate to play Macbeth. (Denzel Washington is all very well–a national treasure in his way. But OI is the more subtle actor.)
In re “Running Man”—I don’t see at this moment how they’re going to make the "corrupt culture idolizing cheap reality stars" point, again. It may have been freshly snarky and trenchant back in 1987. Now, it’s just our reality.
It doesn’t have to be fresh to make a good point. Maybe showcase the difference between the reality of who Richards is compared to what the media makes him to be? In the book, Richards is required to sent videos of himself via mail which the network then broadcasts. In some of those videos, Richards tries talking about the network and they simply dub over his voice so his message never gets out there. From what we’ve heard from people who were on reality shows, the producers very often create a narrative that is anything but real, and in the process make heroes and villains for the sake of ratings.
I enjoyed them both. Were they ‘better’ than the originals? Maybe not. But, on their own merits, I had a good time. Cheesy 80s/90s action hasn’t aged well for me, so that removed any nostalgic objections I might have had.
Released November 2025… What genre are they going to choose, dystopian science fiction or documentary? 
Isn’t Hungar Games basically the same idea?
The first film is pretty good.