Christopher Walken’s failed attempt to justify his worst movie: “I thought it was gonna be good”
From his chilling portrayal of a trauma-stricken soldier in Deerhunter to his endearing and complex performance in Severance, Christopher Walken is firmly in the pantheon of great actors. Achieving relative untouchable status, Walken has earned the right to creative freedom and audition-less job offers from his dense filmography, which spans over 50 years and covers all genres.
But such cultural summits, upon which Walken sits, aren’t immediately achieved. They come from long and arduous creative journeys that often involve a lot of rubbish. Most creativity runs like a dodgy tap – turn it on, and for the most part, it will pour out dirty water, but if you let it go long enough, it starts to turn good.
In Walken’s case, for every King of New York is a Kangaroo Jack, for every Deerhunter is a Gigli. While the aforementioned examples highlight two ends of Walken’s quality spectrum, they also indicate a broad framework of range in which Walken has always been comfortable. His action chops can quickly change from the sincere to the comedic, the tender to the eccentric, and the hallmark of that style has endeared him to cinema fans worldwide.
The comedic end of the spectrum arguably lends itself to a broader sense of artistic licence and can potentially make otherwise mediocre words on a page seem great. Wedding Crashers, for example, is an otherwise average comedy that features nuanced moments of fun from Walken, whose elevating of the words on the page proves his skill as an actor.
But while his performances can glimmer light in relative dimness, some projects are just a team-wide swing and a miss. In 2003, Walken starred in Gigli, a rom-com in which Ben Affleck is ordered to kidnap the brother of a powerful federal prosecutor under the watchful eye of free-spirited gangster Jennifer Lopez. It’s been widely panned by critics for its flimsy plot and lack of inter-character chemistry, which is surprising given Affleck and Lopez’ real-life relationship.
While Walken’s role as Detective Stanley Jacobellis was supporting, he was still caught in the crosshairs of the critics.
In a 2004 interview with IGN, Walken spoke of his career flops and recounted the relative surprise towards Gigli’s panning: “Gigli’s another example,” he said. “We were making Gigli and I thought it was gonna be good. Also, I think there are huge reactions sometimes, which are also mysterious. The press on Gigli… I remember, I was on The Stepford Wives shooting at the time, and we were in the makeup trailer in the morning, seven o’ clock, and all these actors are sitting and getting ready and everybody’s a little sleepy. And one of these guys comes into the trailer with a big stack of newspapers and started to read the reviews. I’m sitting there thinking, ‘How did that happen?’ Nobody had any idea”.
While it’s unanimously agreed that the strength of the film’s narrative couldn’t hold itself up, much of the negative publicity was largely due to Affleck and Lopez’s relationship, which ended up overshadowing the film’s marketing campaign. Walken continued: “But, you know, frankly, that had a lot to do with all the publicity before it. It’s very difficult to talk too much beforehand. You know, to have too much buzz about something”.
Luckily for Walken, he wasn’t the only Hollywood hero to feature in the film, as Al Pacino’s more substantial role as mob boss Starkman is arguably a more shocking inclusion in Martin Brest’s 2003 rom-com. In a decade littered with certifiably average romcoms, it’s quite an achievement to miss the mark this bad. If anything, the film acts as a healthy reminder that even the uber-successful of Hollywood’s rich and famous get it wrong sometimes.
