"Meet the Fockers" was the hit of the holiday season and has now grossed $250 million, but it only highlights the fact that Robert De Niro, two-time Oscar winner and star of culture-defining movies such as "Taxi Driver" and "The Deer Hunter," hasn't made a great film in ages. His latest, the wanna-be thriller "Hide and Seek," caps a five-year string of mediocre movies, including "Men of Honor," "15 Minutes" and "The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle."
Making matters worse, he's now featured in a new American Express commercial...
Not to begrudge Bobby D his big payday, and his success in comedy is in large part due to his persona - we laugh because Paul Vitti (is Analyze This 3 somewhere in development?) IS Jimmy the Gent and Jake LaMotta and young Vito Corleone. This culminated with the amusing yet sadly disturbing spectacle of Fearless Leader spoofing Travis Bickle's "you talkin' to me?" speech. Unlike Brando's self-parody in "The Freshman," where the in-joke of "you look just like" was integral to the film, the Taxi Driver riff was forced and tacked on.
But when I was young, an American Express ad was "Do you know me?" It was what you did when you were obscurely or formerly famous, on the road to obscure. Let's hope that's not DeNiro's fate.
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