Jeff Bridges’ only silver lining from the 2013 movie he disowned: “I’m looking forward to jamming with him”
When you’ve been around the business for as long as Jeff Bridges, who made his screen debut at 13 months old in 1951’s The Company She Keeps, there will always be a few regrettable films along the way.
For the most part, and in keeping with his effortlessly laconic persona, he usually manages to see the bright side. The Giver was shite, Bridges knew it was shite, and he also knew that it was Harvey Weinstein’s fault that it was shite, but since it was a passion project, he just about let it slide.
Seventh Son was also shite, but by reuniting with Julianne Moore, the Academy Award-winning veteran treated the awful, awful fantasy flick as a secret prequel to The Big Lebowski, which may have helped make it a little more palatable for the pair to be caught slumming it in such a shoddy CGI-fest.
Masked and Anonymous? Again, shite, but Bridges got to jam with one of his musical heroes, Bob Dylan, so it wasn’t all bad. 8 Million Ways to Die? Another woeful entry in his filmography, but at least he got to work with the legendary Hal Ashby on the director’s final feature, giving him at least some sense of comfort.
That said, the actor and musician isn’t always willing to ride to the defence of the indefensible. In 2013, he was found scraping the barrel in Robert Schwentke’s atrocious RIPD, a big-budget supernatural caper that was supposed to be a hybrid of Ghostbusters and Men in Black, but turned out as one of the worst studio releases in recent memory instead, deservedly losing a fortune at the box office.
If you ever come across anyone willing to defend RIPD as anything other than a crime against cinema, then give them a slap, because it’s the least they deserve. Even Bridges couldn’t say a single good thing about it, and as much as he enjoyed the process of making it, he summed up the finished article as being the cinematic equivalent of when “the jockey fell off the horse, and you came in last.”
It was a shitshow, make no mistake, but there was at least a solitary silver lining. Whenever Bridges is circling a new project, he tends to peruse the other names attached in the hopes that there’s somebody involved who shares his musical proclivities. On RIPD, there was, and it wasn’t Ryan Reynolds.
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“It’s a real interesting thing, how all those strings come together,” he mused before the start of production. “I just found out Kevin Bacon has been cast in RIPD, and he’s another actor/musician, so I’m looking forward to jamming with him. Who knows what will come of that?”
What came of that was absolutely not a good movie, or even a serviceable one, but a complete and utter disaster. On the plus side, you know for a fact that when they weren’t required on set, Bridges and Bacon would have sat down and strummed a few chords, which would have made the experience ever so slightly more palatable for both.
