Movie Studio Expects James McAvoy To Solve A Crime In Real-Time
You know what will be fun after the pandemic -- theme parties. With the entire art scene having collapsed, it'll never be cheaper to hire out-of-work actors to run your haunted mansion, or just pay an entire improv group some exposure to dust off their old Murder on the Orient Express costumes and host a murder mystery party. What I'm saying, is, there'll really no need to spend millions of dollars letting James McAvoy run through a city-wide escape room and film it.
Have you ever wanted to see a good actor do bad improv? Well, in 2021, excited movie-stayer-inners will get to pay for the privilege to see James McAvoy run through an entire detective movie without having read the script -- which is just another way of saying that we're about to watch McAvoy play a Live Action Role Playing adventure. Based on the French movie of the same name (ugh, don't you hate it when they publish a module twice), in My Son, McAvoy plays a level 16 actor who must Bluff check his way through past cast members that have a full-script. The adventure is pretty boilerplate: His son has gone missing, and he has to travel to his ex-wife's small town to figure out which dastardly villain he needs to defeat to finish the campaign.
Of course, as every Dungeon Master knows about single-player adventures, the real flop-risk here is not James McAvoy's talent as an actor, but as a detective. And you'd think there'd be some narrative leniency for the sake of the poor editor afterward, but according to the studio's chairman: "James will be doing the detective work of the film in real-time, on camera, to create real tension for this thriller." Detective work. In real-time. On camera. Unless you're a Colombo-level detecting genius (and I'm talking about Peter Falk here), that feels like a recipe for audiences screaming warnings at the screen like they're watching the world's dumbest teen in a '90s slasher movie.
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Because if he's just really crap at it? What if James McAvoy the guy they have to emergency evac out of an escape room because he threw an old-timey gas lantern into an Egyptian rug out of frustration for not figuring out the first puzzle? What if My Son is just two hours of McAvoy, a rich actor, fiddling with his spotty GPS on a country road until he gets a call telling him they've fished his kid out of a nearby pond? (Actually, that sounds like a great movie.) All I'm saying is they've really squandered an opportunity by not casting Liam Neeson.
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Top Image: Gage Skidmore
