You have to feel for actors from time to time. (Well, you don’t have to at all, but it’s a new year and we’re still feeling benevolent.) There’s the finest of lines in a career between feeling overly defined by a successful role and feeling entirely undefined once that role’s cultural currency plummets – and once you’ve crossed it, it’s awfully difficult to pry your way back into the popular imagination. As much as we criticize certain big-name stars for clinging to the predictable comforts and rewards of franchise cinema, it’s hard to argue with its strategic benefits.
Take Renée Zellweger: after a six-year absence from screens (longer for the vast majority that didn’t see her whimsical country-and-western disability drama My Own Love Song), what better way to jump-start a comeback than a third outing as the still beloved, still beleaguered everywoman Bridget Jones? A dozen years after The Edge of Reason, US audiences may have demurred, but elsewhere – not least in the UK – Zellweger and Bridget Jones’s Baby were embraced like old, long-absent friends. However the star’s other new projects turn out, she clearly still has a fallback role.
At this stage, Zellweger is hardly the only participant with something to gain from prolonging Bridget’s diary, even if Hugh Grant thought it was time to call it a day. But what happens when an actor’s enthusiasm for reviving a career-high franchise isn’t quite matched by anyone else’s? Thus do we enter a perilous subdivision of vanity project, one in which sequels and reboots become less an act of fan service than a drive for self-preservation – one no less difficult than trying to make “fetch” happen.
Which brings us, unhappily, to Lindsay Lohan. Once the brightest and most relatable of Hollywood’s mid-2000s teen pack, the actor presently known as “troubled” has earned fewer headlines of late for her work than for her broken promise to switch on Christmas lights in the small English town of Kettering – a variety of scandal generally unfamiliar to 30-year-old Hollywood starlets. Given her absence from cinema screens since Paul Schrader’s thoroughly greasy 2013 indie The Canyons, you can hardly blame Lohan for taking to the rearview mirror and casting her mind back to 2004, when the fast, fizzy, ultra-quotable Mean Girls set the bar for a generation’s high school comedies. Lohan’s performance as the misfit newbie in a shark pool of classroom cliquery remains her easiest, breeziest star turn; she clearly agrees, as she’s so desperate to play Cady Heron (at least) once more that she’s written her own script treatment for a sequel.
“I have been trying so hard to do a Mean Girls 2,” she said in a CNN Facebook Live interview last week, conveniently (and not unreasonably) overlooking the existence of a 2011 television film with that very title. Trouble is, original Mean Girls screenwriter Tina Fey isn’t quite so eager. “I know Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels and all of Paramount are very busy. But I will keep forcing it and pushing it on them until we do it.” Those well acquainted with Lohan’s sometimes recklessly impassioned tweets should understand that this is no minor threat.
Lohan’s one-woman campaign brings to mind misty memories of another actor’s attempts to reignite a dormant franchise with behind-the-camera input. As early as 2007, Sharon Stone was fuelling talk of Basic Instinct 3 – with a view not only to playing the bisexual icepick murderer Catherine Tramell again, but to directing the entire unrequested vehicle. We have yet to find to find out whether Stone was merely in stubborn denial of the fascinatingly all-encompassing failure of 2006’s abject Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction, or thought she could improve on director Michael Caton-Jones’s bungled handling – and let’s face it, she probably could. The rumor gets a fresh airing every few years, but Lohan would be wise to view it as a cautionary one.
Yet it says much for the industry’s persistent gender imbalance that the attempts of past-peak actresses to reanimate career-making roles are so often treated as futile folly, while their male counterparts frequently get the green light for equally absurd proposals. Having written his own breakthrough part with Rocky 40 years ago, Sylvester Stallone thinks nothing of keeping fusty franchises going entirely on his own steam: Rocky V in 1990 was already pushing it, but writing and directing Rocky Balboa 16 years later and persuading MGM to back it was a feat of startling devotion to one’s own brand, if little else. Poetic justice came last year, when Stallone and Balboa were demoted to an admittedly Oscar-nominated supporting presence in Ryan Coogler’s Creed, an urgent, red-meat boxing drama that asserted itself as the best film in the Rocky, er, universe, without a scrap of writing or directing input from Sly himself. Meanwhile, even the franchise’s lowest points were higher than 2008’s Stallone-directed Rambo, a grim, desultory return to the jungle for the actor’s grizzled Vietnam vet, arriving a whopping 20 years after Rambo III and betraying every one of them.
Vin Diesel, meanwhile, may yet prove to be Hollywood’s king of endlessly extended action gruel – not so much for the Fast and Furious series, for which demand remains globally clamorous even at the seven-film and 16-year mark, but for the considerably more against-the-odds achievement of bringing two far less actively invited properties back into play. Does anyone remember the xXx films – a less formally dressed James Bond reworking firmly rooted in the nu-metal era and aesthetic of the early 2000s – quite as fondly as Diesel does? We’ll find out this year, when Xander Cage pummels us back into submission in the prosaically titled xXx: Return of Xander Cage (no time or breath for definite articles here), while Diesel’s tirelessly slogging sci-fi antihero Riddick is also due to test audiences’ loyalties (or simply memories) with a fourth go-round. (Let’s not even dignify the mooted possibility of a Last Witch Hunter sequel with our consideration before we absolutely have to.)
At this rate, Lindsay Lohan isn’t looking quite ambitious enough: she should strike with a proposed Parent Trap re-up while the iron’s cold.
