Paul Bettany in Legion. Oh, well, if you insist.

I remember the days when I used to fantasise about Paul Bettany (and I don’t like blondes as a rule, so I hope he realises the sacrifice I made in his case). It was shortly after he played an alternate universe version of Geoffrey Chaucer in A Knight’s Tale, in which he was young and sexy, liked parties and dressed in removably loose wool jumpers (unlike the actual Chaucer who, as far as I can tell, was a bureacrat who knew how to tell a good yarn but had a tendency to take advantage of defenceless girls and drink too much). Then he played the doctor in Master and Commander and he had that Old World actory wisdom that makes you look past the bald hairpiece and swoon. Oh Paul. Show me your insect collection. I promise I won’t make a single joke about the Daddy Long Legs compensating for something…

Then of course he starred in Wimbledon, and my brain did the sensible thing by immediately erasing any traces of my crush rather than subject me to watching that yawnfest in the cinema. So that was the end of that.

But the fact remains that Bettany is a brilliant actor, and so it is getting quite annoying that he has been stuck in the niche that so many grave but attractive British actors get sucked into in Hollywood. Over and over, he just seems to play the villain/morally ambiguous one in film after film after film. Unfortunately for Paulie, Hollywood seems to be a little swamped with these types, so Bettany’s corner of the market is quite bizarrely specific. Where Sean Bean got to stretch his muscles from tortured nonconformist in Equilibrium to tortured megalomaniac in The Lord of the Rings to mildly troubled fellow in Flightplan (alongside fellow creepoid nichemonger Peter Sarsgaard), and the truly awesome Alan Rickman gets to play baddies in big budget fight fest after big budget fight fest, Bettany’s grand prize is…the religious ones! Yes, the religious ones. Well, at least the ostensibly subversive excuses for lots of blood and violence and chasing with a dash of religious overtones thrown in to give pretty low budget fare a nonetheless “epic” feel. Granted we are peculiarly well-served with that sub-genre at the moment, for reasons that I cannot fathom, but this latest installment, Legion, hardly looks set to break the box office. Check out the trailer below and see for yourself.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a bit of trashy “look at us making God out not to be that great a bloke after all, har har har” action fare, and who doesn’t want to see what would happen if you crossed From Dusk Till Dawn with Constantine? If you ask me, the best movie mashups always happen when you take two disappointingly incoherent/ill-conceived good ideas and jam them together into a film that wouldn’t have had the budget or commitment to realise even half of the originals’ special effects. In other words, I. Can’t. Wait.

Am I being sarcastic? I have no idea. But my real point is, why, Paul, whyyyy? Sure I want to see this film, I inevitably will, but I’d rather see, you know, a good film with him in it and I’m sure there must be enough people feeling this way that it’d get a decent chunk of box office just from people hoping that the film will magically turn out to be a sequel of Master and Commander alone (teasing us with that subtitle and then not following through really is the cruellest form of torture).

And if he’s just doing films where he gets to be a psychotic member of a Catholic cult, or he gets to kill God (I am totally lovefilming that one…oh okay fine. It’s about Charles Darwin. No it doesn’t fit the pattern. Shut up, okay, shut up! The Guardian lied!), or fight God, who’s bad, in order to protect the Second Coming of God, which is good (that last one’s Legion. Can I get a “huh?”) because he thinks they’re fun, then frankly, what the hell is he thinking? Being a famous, attractive, talented, wealthy actor isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be a long hard slog of giving us, the slavishly adoring consumers, exactly what we want. And what we want is to see him in the midst of the 1920s sauntering through parties looking debonair and seducing women who look exactly. Like. Me.

I assume that everyone else feels more or less completely the same way that I do on this matter, so let’s leave this discussion at that, and hope that Bettany takes our suggestions on board. Points for effort Paul, but frankly, could do better.

Addendum: I’ve just discovered via Popwatch that Paul Bettany is doing yet another religiously themed movie in 2010, playing a vampire-hunting (yes, you heard me right. Those critters are taking over. Someone needs to fumigate) priest. Umm, quel le crap?

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