David Frank knows more than you. Care to disagree?

Bruce Campbell once admitted to taking a TV gig because his house needed a new water heater. Fair enough. He's a working B-movie actor, use to paying for life's necessities with bottom-dwelling roles. But what's Joan Allen's excuse?

I knew master-hack Paul W.S. Anderson cast her in his rerape, I mean remake, of Death Race 2000. Yet, it didn't truly hit me until that trailer for Mad Max, I mean The Running Man, ah dammit I mean Death Race crawled onto the net the other week: Joan Allen, the best actress working today, is in a Paul W.S. Anderson film! What's next? Will Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the finest young actor working today, appear in a Stephen Sommers' toy commercial? Oh you gotta be shitting me!?!

I hope Allen's deal will pay out enough to purchase the Hawaiian islands… all of them. She'll need that sort of vast wilderness to hole up in after Death Disgrace stomps her filmography like a surfer gang of Matthew McConaughey fans. It's not that her resume is pristine (Josh and S.A.M.). Yet, a Paul W.S. Anderson movie is a rotten, incurable tumor on a filmography. If it doesn't kill you, it will surely cripple. Just ask Sam Neill.

Eventually, all successful actors slum it. It reminds me of the exchange between Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back:

Affleck: What've I been telling you? You gotta do the safe picture. Then you can do the art picture. But then sometimes you gotta do the payback picture because your friend says you owe him. And sometimes, you have to go back to the well.

Damon: And sometimes, you do Reindeer Games.

Death Race must be Allen's Reindeer Games. But at least Affleck had the fortune to work with John Frankenheimer. All Allen gets is a cribbing dullard like Anderson, which probably felt like a bomb-drop from the moon after working with the brilliant Paul Greengrass. I understand that film actors need that safe studio film. It secures the kids' college funds, a swank house, and that pet rhinoceros they always wanted to buy for mom. And most importantly, assuming the film pulls in money, it gives the actor some clout and breathing room to make the projects they're passionate about.

David can't believe she's in this movie and neither can that dude in the background
Photo: Universal Pictures

Allen has expertly juggled the safe films (the Bourne franchise for example) with smaller ones such as Yes. And that's what I love about her. Those safe films are damn excellent movies. It's a stupid myth that quality and studio paychecks must exclude one another.

This is why I cannot comprehend her involvement in Death Race. Maybe all of this bitching is for nothing, and the film will kick ass, forcing me to re-evaluate Paul W.S. Anderson as he stands now: the worst mainstream, genre filmmaker alive (Uwe Boll isn't mainstream). I don't know. Doubt it. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who fucks up something as easy as Aliens Vs. Predator is a born failure.

So my real fear is that Allen shows early signs of that strange, ghastly disease of which Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have ailed from for years now.

Disease Name: Paymemymoney Fever, commonly known as Orson Welle's syndrome.

Major symptoms: apathy towards craft; reckless desire to destroy legacy with shitty movies; obsessive large-sum check cashing

It's a heartbreaking disease, look at what it's done to poor Burt Reynolds, whose condition went into recession for one glorious year with Boogie Nights, but has now returned with a vengeance. Uwe Boll films connote full-blown Paymemymoney Fever. And it is a horrifying sight! Few recover. And even if they do, the scars can be disfiguring.

We cannot allow this to happen to Joan Allen. She's too talented. And she has yet to win her long overdue Oscar. If the woman needs a new water heater. Then by God, give it to her with no strings attached.

Related post categories: Editorials, The Shallow End : Death Race, Joan Allen

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