The horrendous 2000 movie Robert De Niro refuses to regret: “I had a good time”
It’s just as well that Al Pacino and Robert De Niro had established themselves as all-time greats by the end of the 1980s; otherwise, the pair would have done some serious damage to their legacies by now.
When you’ve played as many iconic roles as they have, been in as many iconic movies as they’ve been in, given as many incredible performances as they’ve given, and won as many awards as they’ve won, no amount of subpar shite will be able to take away their shared status as two of cinema’s best-ever actors.
It can’t be a coincidence that almost all of De Niro and Pacino’s worst movies have been released since the turn of the millennium, with the kind of powerhouse performance they used to be capable of in their sleep becoming the exception instead of the rule. If they’re happy and they’re getting paid, you can’t really begrudge them, even if the world would be much better off without Godsend or Dirty Grandpa.
Since they’ve been almost symbiotically intertwined since the early 1970s, it’s only fitting that Pacino was to blame for De Niro focusing so heavily on comedy in the 2000s, very rarely for the better, and almost always for the worse. That, and Meet the Parents, which opened the doors to the crap that followed.
However, less than four months before the Ben Stiller comedy premiered in cinemas, De Niro’s first film of the 21st century immediately established the low bar. Not so much stepping into self-parody as cannonballing into it from a great height and making a hell of a splash, the two-time Academy Award winner played Fearless Leader in The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle.
Gurning for the cameras, hamming it up, and playing for the back row of theatres that were pretty much empty, considering the picture failed to recoup even half of its budget back in ticket sales, watching a generational talent spoof their own seminal Taxi Driver monologue wasn’t funny; it was cringeworthy, embarrassing, and more than a little bit sad.
Somehow, De Niro managed to avoid being spotlighted by the Razzies, and in an equally surprising outcome, Rene Russo’s ‘Worst Supporting Actress’ nomination was The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle‘s only nod. Martin Scorsese’s first muse has a few regrets from a legendary career, but, rather incredulously, this wasn’t one of them.
Fortunately, he didn’t even try to defend the movie in general, or offer a defence of an atrociously exaggerated turn that illustrated why deadpan comedy will always be his strongest suit and not going broad, but a curt, “I had a good time on Rocky & Bullwinkle” was curious, since he’s made many better films than that one and had many more negative things to say about them.
Look, if he wanted to get paid a lot of money and have a lot of fun, then fair fucks: he’s Robert De Niro, he’s allowed to do that if he fancies it. Still, little did anyone know at the time that his first big-screen outing of the century would lay down a most unwanted marker.
