I don’t quite understand how Robert De Niro chooses his projects. He just balked on a film that’s script is one of the hottest unproduced stories around, “Honeymoon with Harry”; not only that, Jonathan Demme (“Silence of the Lambs”, “Philadelphia”), a man who rarely makes a bad film, was attached to direct. Demme and Jenny Lumet even went so far as to polish Paul Haggis’s (!) script for De Niro. Bradley Cooper, who is attached to the film (and co-stars with De Niro in the new film “Limitless“, which many say is De Niro’s best film in quite some time), apparently went bananas for the script, loved it. But Bob? Nope, not for him.
So what is for you these days, sir? Is it mind-numbingly awful studio slop like “Meet the Fockers” and it’s even uglier younger sister “Little Fockers”? Maybe it’s the two-hander he did with Al Pacino, er, “Righteous Kill”? (Yeah, because that had a great script, heh), no wait, it’s any film that offers you the opportunity to bounce lines of William Shatner, right?
Clearly, De Niro doesn’t know what he’s doing anymore. Whereas in the ’80s and most of the ’90s, the actor chose his projects wisely, in turn serving up great film after great film after great (in fact, probably the weakest film De Niro did in the early ’90s was, well, “Stanley & Iris” and even that’s not that bad), the days of “Angel Heart”, “Midnight Run”, “Goodfellas”, “Heat” and “The Untouchables” were seemingly a lot longer ago than we remember.
We keep hearing about this “Irishman” movie that De Niro is apparently going to do with Martin Scorsese and the man himself was talking up a “Midnight Run” sequel at one point, but seriously, I’ll believe it when I see it..er, them. I think it’s much more likely De Niro’s newly-acquired tastes will lead to a fourth “Fockers” movie or a live-action version of “Magilla Gorilla” than anything that has a chance at redeeming the once (and probably still) great actor.
Whether or not “Honeymoon with Harry” gets made with Bradley Cooper and some other big-timer remains to be seen; for the moment, Deadline says that De Niro’s now lack of interest in the project has put the film on ice at New Line. Shame.
