Chris Pratt has always been likable and charismatic. I decided he was okay five years ago after catching his performance as an insecure baseball player in Moneyball, and doubly so after he played a studly musclebound Seal who smoked a couple of baddies in Zero Dark Thirty. I didn’t like it when he became a fatass in order to play Andy Dywer in Parks and Recreation, but his thinner incarnation allowed me to accept that he was probably the new Harrison Ford. And then I really fell for his routine two years ago in Guardians of the Galaxy.

But soon after an apparent weakness began to reveal itself — Pratt began to offer indications that he has no taste in projects.

He was okay in Jurassic World but I fucking hated the film. (Nobody with any judgment had any love for it — it was laughably ridiculous.) And then he starred in The Magnificent Seven, another piece of shit. And then Pratt lied through his teeth about the basic scheme of Passengers (the script for which he had called “the best I ever read”), and then Morten Tyldum‘s sci-fi epic was savaged by critics and seriously underperformed.

And then it began to sink in that Pratt is some kind of Christian Republican who likes to own and fire weapons and eat meat and drink beer and all that other alpha-male stuff. Which means he’s probably a Trump supporter. So basically Pratt is a congenial if moderately talented marquee name who’s good looking in a brawny, broad-shouldered, regular-dude kind of way, but is clearly no heavyweight in terms of talent or perception. Which means he’s more or less Lee Majors.

Yes, I’m sure he’ll be totally fine in Galaxy of the Guardians 2 (5.5.17).

Choice quote from new Vanity Fair cover story: “That was the first time I heard someone say, ‘We’re not gonna cast you — you’re too fat.’ So I decided to drop the weight, like in wrestling. I couldn’t afford a trainer, so it was all running and crash-dieting and cutting alcohol.”