The 2003 movie masterpiece Jack Nicholson couldn’t stand: “I walked out before the end”
Having starred in a few of them himself, you’d assume that Jack Nicholson knows a motion picture masterpiece when he sees one, but even the legendary actor has his limits, apparently.
Anyone who anoints themselves as the single most successful thespian that Hollywood has ever seen, and then pulls out the receipts to back it up, is going to have strong opinions on what they do and don’t like, and before one of the 21st century’s greatest films had the chance to roll credits, he was gone.
On the other hand, this is the same Jack Nicholson who forecast that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was a harbinger of the cinematic apocalypse, and a feature that spelt the end of the industry as he knew it. It didn’t, thank fuck, but it does at least show that he wasn’t right about everything all the time.
Unsurprisingly, for a three-time Academy Award winner, fantastical fare and franchises weren’t his bread and butter. He made a few of them, sure, and his performances in Tim Burton’s Batman and Mars Attacks!, Mike Nichols’ Wolf, and George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick are worth savouring, but a butt-numbing epic that unfolded in a fictional world obviously didn’t float his boat.
That would be Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the second-highest-grossing release in cinema history at the time, the first movie not directed by James Cameron to earn over a billion dollars at the box office, and the grandstanding conclusion to one of modern Hollywood’s most staggering onscreen achievements.
The third, and what really should have been the final, chapter in Jackson’s Middle-Earth saga also won all 11 of the Oscars it was nominated for, sweeping the board in the process, but since he couldn’t hack the 200-minute theatrical version, it feels safe to assume that he didn’t bother his arse with the 252-minute extended edition.
When he brought the family to see Return of the King, Nicholson promptly fucked off before the end, got into his car and started warming up the engine, biding his time until the three-hour-plus slog was over, and everyone could go home, something he told Elijah Wood to his face when they crossed paths.
“You know, what happened?” he asked the trilogy’s Frodo, admitting he hadn’t stuck around for the ending. After being informed of the final scenes, he didn’t seem too impressed. “I didn’t even see it,” he added for emphasis. “I walked out before the end.” On the plus side, at least he knows how it ended.
Not that he gives a shit, clearly, and, if anything, it’s impressive that Nicholson managed to last that long when he clearly wasn’t having a great time with Return of the King.
