The terrible movie Jon Bernthal absolutely adores: “I know probably no one else says that”
It only feels like yesterday that Jon Bernthal was stealing Rick Grimes’ wife on The Walking Dead. Now, he’s one of Hollywood’s most in-demand tough-guy actors.
Everybody knows Bernthal as Frank Castle, the titular antihero from The Punisher, but he’s also cropped up in major movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, Baby Driver, and The Many Saints of Newark. With a Disney+ ‘Punisher’ show in the works and a place in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey already confirmed, the future is looking bright for this modern-day brawler.
Unfortunately, things haven’t always gone Bernthal’s way. Like every actor, he’s got a fair share of stinkers on his CV. He played a police officer in Oliver Stone’s ill-judged docu-drama World Trade Center and as Dwayne Johnson’s pal in the middling drug thriller Snitch. He also appeared in Roman Polanski’s film The Ghost Writer. It was a critical hit, sure, but working with Polanski in 2010? There’s no excuse for that.
Dud films have been a constant presence in Bernthal’s life, as he explained to Rotten Tomatoes. When asked to give his five favourite films, he began by naming all of the usual suspects – Goodfellas and The Silence of the Lambs – as well as other highly regarded flicks like True Romance and A Prophet. Then came the time for answer number five, and it caught everyone off guard.
“I gotta say DC Cab,” Bernthal admitted, laughing almost as soon as he’d said it, “I know that probably no one else says that.”
For those who don’t know (which may well be all of you), DC Cab is a 1983 comedy movie from director Joel Schumacher. Adam Baldwin plays Albert, a mild-mannered man who moves to Washington DC to fulfil his dreams of joining a taxi firm. When the owner of the company, a family friend of Albert’s, is kidnapped, the youngster joins forces with his fellow drivers, led by Mr T’s Samson, to rescue him from his fate.
With an absolutely killer premise like that, you’ll be surprised to learn that DC Cab was a complete bust. All the rest of Bernthal’s choices score in the 1990s on the patented Tomatometer, while this poor thing scrapes over the line with a measly 18%. At least the song ‘The Dream (Hold On to Your Dream’ by Irene Cara (who appears in the film as herself) was something of a minor hit.
None of that matters, though. Not according to Bernthal, anyway. “I’m born and raised DC. I’m DC through and through. It will always be in my heart,” he said, revealing that he and a pal used to rent the movie over and over again on VHS when they were kids. “It shows a little bit of the real D.C. that I think never gets shown in films and television. I just love the movie. I think it’s the only honest D.C. movie ever made, and it’s funny as hell.”
For most people, DC Cab will be little more than an oddity – that time the guy who made Batman Forever teamed up with the bloke from The A-Team. For Jon Bernthal, however, it represents a special time in his life and a special place in his heart. At the end of the day, isn’t that what movies are all about?
