With Thanksgiving just around the corner it’s time to expand A Complete Unknown’s earlybird viewing audience. I’m getting a little tired of Kris Tapley’s annoying discretion and silence. If Timothee Chalamet really has slammed the ball into the bleachers, what deep-down, jingle-jangle thoughts occurred when you, a Mangold pally or so I’ve heard, heard the crack of the bat? And what about Edward Norton as Seeger? And all the other players? C’mon…

From Kevin Maher’s London Times review:

“Paul Mescal’s Lucius character is shaky at best, and the versatile actor, but for a couple of dazzling close-ups (very Richard Harris in Camelot), consistently struggles to enliven the gig — he frequently puts the ‘meh’ into Mescal.”

From Owen Gleiberman‘s Gladiator II review, posted on 11.11 at 6 am:

“The whole film is tailored to the next-generation specifications of its star, Paul Mescal, who plays a descendant of Russell Crowe’s Maximus and does it by not trying to imitate Crowe’s performance. In Gladiator, Crowe, wielding a sword that was like an extension of his inner hostility, was the ultimate thinking person’s badass. Mescal, svelte and placid, comes on more like the disheveled son of Marlon Brando — a forlorn pussycat turned rager.

“Mescal doesn’t have anything approaching [Crowe’s] elemental masculine gravitas. His Lucius, who is captured and brought to Rome to be a gladiator, is sulky and pensive, with a quizzical look. His stare is sensitive, his grin rueful, his lower jaw juts. But Mescal has something that works for the movie –he projects not revenge but a shaggy rugged nobility, the idealism that will make Lucius the potential savior of Rome.”

Little White Lies‘ Hannah Strong:

“The normally reliable Mescal is a pale imitation of Crowe, although it’s down to the uninspired script rather than his acting — Lucius has little emotional range beyond rage, and while this works to grand effect in the early gladiator battle between Lucius and a bunch of bloodthirsty baboons, the wind goes out of his sails quickly.”

Vulture‘s Alison Willmore:

“The Irish actor, a usually intriguing presence, doesn’t hold the screen here so much as he vanishes into its tumult. Of all the ways in which Mescal feels miscast, the most fatal may be his utter inability to seem like someone other guys would follow to their deaths. Mescal [is] terrible at giving the rousing speeches that were so iconic in Gladiator and that Gladiator II, which has a clunkier script written by David Scarpa, attempts to re-create.

“Mescal’s instinct is to underplay these moments rather than bellow theatrically, which is a problem, especially when saddled with somewhat confusing slogans like ‘Where we are, death is not!'”

But basic impression-wise, I can’t seem to shake this underlying feeling that there’s something a wee bit underwhelming about the costars of Wicked being only 5’1″ tall. The tallest of the Wizard of Oz munchkins were 4’8″, so Grande and Erivo are closer to human-sized. But not by much.

This obviously isn’t a “problem”, per se. I’m just stating a physical fact. No biggie.

…but today he said this:

[9:45 to 10:37] “When the Iraq War began more than 75% of the American people were all behind it, but [this] didn’t last long. Elections are a choice, and a lot of Americans didn’t like what they saw [coming out of] the Democratic party, which now has two years to get its shit together and be in a position to take advantage of the first midterm election of Donald Trump’s incumbency, which historically should be a disaster for him. Two years from now Democrats must have a check on Donald Trump, and the only way they’ll have one is by taking back the House of Representatives.

“[And this] means the abandonment of this woke insanity…it means the abandonment of the lecturing and the hectoring and the demands to say your pronouns or else. Because the American people have rejected it.”

This means something. It means that sensible, mainstream liberal-minded adults, jolted by the catastrophic victory of The Beast over Kamala Harris, are suddenly sick of all the woke bullshit, as I noted on Sunday, 11.10. Schmidt never even alluded to, much less mentioned, general woke terror before today, but now he finally gets it.

…that everyone will see and be thrilled by, and which everyone will flush out of their systems less than a day after seeing it. There has to be more to life, dear God, than a relentless adherence to tried-and-true formula and great gushings of power-punch, slam-bam action whoopee.

Mission – Impossible: The Final Reckoning opens on 5.23.25.