Justice League Mortal Redux.

Peter Suderman responds to my earlier post on Justice League Mortal and the rumoured casting of Hayden Christensen as Superman therein:

I’m not sure the casting Christensen, if confirmed, would be particularly good news, but I don’t see why this project ought to be sunk. Yes, it’s low on star power, but the first X-Men film showed you could make a fine superhero picture without any A-list performers. (Hugh Jackman, an unknown at the time, was catapulted to his current status by that film’s success.) And I’d rather see something made rather than nothing at all. More than that, I’m just curious what would happen if you gave the director of Mad Max and The Road Warrior $100 million and said “Go make a superhero movie!”

For what it’s worth, I will grant that the involvement of George Miller is the one thing about this franchise that gives my skepticism pause. But how much pause, I could not say. Apart from the Mad Max trilogy (1979-1985), Miller has directed only four non-documentary feature films — The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Lorenzo’s Oil (1992), Babe: Pig in the City (1998) and Happy Feet (2006) — and I had mixed feelings about the three that I saw.

As for the question of whether the original X-Men (2000) had any A-list actors, I would suggest that talented thespians such as Star Trek veteran Patrick Stewart, the Oscar-winning Anna Paquin and the Oscar-nominated Ian McKellen brought a certain cachet to their superhero movie that none of the rumoured cast members in Justice League Mortal have.

But the more important point here is that the actors in X-Men were completely appropriate to their characters, whereas this does not seem to be the case with Justice League Mortal, which has reportedly been skewing so young that a number of online pundits have said the film looks more like a big-screen version of Teen Titans than anything else.

Yes, Hugh Jackman was a complete unknown when the first X-Men came out. But he was, quite decidedly, a man and not a boy, already in his 30s when he first played Wolverine. (He will be 40 when the prequel comes out next year.) Most of the actors rumoured to be involved in Justice League, on the other hand, are in their early to mid 20s — including, yes, Christensen, who is still best-known for playing whiny post-adolescents, even in justly acclaimed films such as Billy Ray’s Shattered Glass (2003).

And on the rare occasion that someone over the age of 30 is associated with Justice League Mortal, it turns out to be someone like Common, who is a rapper and not an actor, per se. (And on points like this, I defer to Samuel L. Jackson.) Again, contrast that with Hugh Jackman, who certainly knows his way around musical theatre but was trained primarily as an actor.

Finally, in response to Suderman’s statement that “something” is better than “nothing at all”, I offer these clips from the decade-old TV-movie Justice League of America (1997):

Click here if the video file above doesn’t play properly.