In Matt Donnelly’s 4.16 Variety story about Michael B. Jordan‘s forthcoming The Thomas Crown Affair (Amazon, 3.5.27), a remake of a remake of Norman Jewison’s 1968 original, there’s a Jordan quote that suggests some kind of righteous, score-settling reparation angle may be in the works.
Besides directing, producing and starring as the slickly felonious lead character (i.e., more or less the same wealthy, sexy smoothie played by Steve McQueen in ’68 and Pierce Brosnan in John McTiernan’s 1999 refresh), Jordan’s Thomas Crown, according to Donnelly, “wants to retrieve precious artifacts misappropriated, stolen from their rightful creators [and] sold over the centuries…the 1% monsters who buy and trade history and human lives.”
Jordan is referring, of course, to the usual demonic racist white-guy baddies, represented in this instance by Kenneth Branagh. Branagh’s shithead will either suffer a grievous financial loss or perhaps be murdered as payback for heinous crimes. Remember the machine-gun-brandishing Jordan mowing down those overweight KKK crackers in Sinners? Same basic revenge deal, I’m presuming, in next year’s Crown.
“I didn’t want a reboot,” Jordan told Variety last November. “I wanted a reimagination. The first two films were about rich white guys stealing for fun. That doesn’t land today. Ours is more personal. The stakes are higher. [But our film] still got the fashion, romance.”
McQueen’s Crown was into the thrill of stealing and getting away with it, sure, but Jewison’s film presented him as a kind of romantic, super-rich, three-piece-suit-wearing Clyde Barrow, a quietly rebellious loner striking a symbolic blow against the establishment and straightlaced bourgeois values.
Considering the repeated emphasis on cunnilingus in Sinners and Faye Dunaway‘s notorious simulation of sex with chess pieces in the ’68 version, it’s pretty much guaranteed that Jordan and costar Adria Arjona (in the Dunaway role) will indulge in some kind of heated activity, symbolic or otherwise.
