The forgotten 1999 movie Christopher Walken called his most overlooked: “It didn’t do anything”
Having made so many movies that even he hasn’t gotten around to seeing them all, there’s little chance that anyone other than the most diehard subset of Christopher Walken fans would go out of their way to devour his entire filmography.
It doesn’t help matters that so many of them are shite, too, but that’s what happens when you’ve got a prolific veteran actor who loves their job so much that they’ll say yes to virtually anything that comes their way, unless it’s set in the one location that he doesn’t want to go anywhere near again, presumably.
On the flipside, it does help matters that Walken’s best films are very, very, very good, with True Romance, Pulp Fiction, The Deer Hunter, Catch Me If You Can, The Dead Zone, Pennies from Heaven, and many more having plenty of rewatch value, something that can’t be said about his lesser efforts.
He unironically likes Gigli and Puss in Boots, but he’s in the minority on that front, if not the only defender of those cinematic monstrosities. Is anyone desperate to see the likes of Joe Dirt, Kangaroo Jack, Nine Lives, or The Stepford Wives remake for the first time, never mind a repeat viewing? Hopefully not.
The Academy Award winner definitely wouldn’t encourage folks to waste their time on Tony Scott’s Domino, which he considers the worst performance of his entire career, which is saying something when he’s currently 150 or so credits into it, but there is one forgotten flick he’d heartily recommend.
1999 wasn’t his finest year in front of the camera, although, being Christopher Walken, he still appeared in four features. Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow is the most memorable by far, and while the Brendan Fraser-led Blast from the Past has some nostalgic supporters, how many people can recall at the drop of a hat that he was in The Opportunists, or that the crime drama even exists?
Taking a trip down memory lane, Walken was asked if any pictures immediately came to mind that he wished more people had seen, or that didn’t get a fair shake of the stick the first time around. He instantly remembered one, and he knew that “it didn’t do anything” initially, before being hit by a blast of reminiscence. “It disappeared, you know?” the star reflected. “And I never saw it. And then I saw it the other day on The Movie Channel, and it was funny.”
“This was a picture called Kiss Toledo Goodbye,” he explained. “And I played kind of a low-level mob guy. Not very bright. It was funny.” One of the main reasons why it had slipped his and everyone else’s minds is that director Lyndon Chubbuck’s caper didn’t see the inside of a cinema after being shuffled straight to video.
In the film, Walken plays a mobster who helps Michael Rapaport impersonate a mafia don to prevent a gang war after his old man, whom he’d previously never known was his real father, gets assassinated. It slipped so far under the radar that the song-and-dance man never saw it until a decade after its release, but when he did, he wasted little time in labelling Kiss Toledo Goodbye as an unsung gem.
