Like the rest of the world, we’re still waiting to be impressed by Channing Tatum. We first saw him in “Step Up” and wondered when this jive-talking b-boy comic relief was going to get hit by a bus, necessitating the arrival of the real male lead. And then it never happened! Suddenly, the mumbly, muscled young thesp was everywhere, sometimes believably (“A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints” where he played a monosyllabic bruiser) mostly not (everything else).
He’s got a financial winner this weekend in “GI Joe” so his future might be in action films, but it is certainly not in mafia films. For a brief time the former model was attached to a mooted film adaptation of “The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer” as mob hitman Richard Kuklinski. Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who got Tatum the coveted Duke role in “Joe,” was sheperding the project, but it hit a snag when he took the idea of Tatum-as-Kuklinski to the book’s author Phil Carlo.
“I had to turn him down. I really hated the idea of Channing Tatum. I told di Bonaventura that this is not the guy to play one of the most feared killers of the 20th Century,” Carlo told the NY Post. “I think Mickey Rourke would really be good. He’s got that sense of danger, and there’s a similarity between the two. But it’s not Channing Tatum.” This should give you an idea as to the little regard producers have for writers. Di Bonaventura and Carlo had an eighteen month window extended so that they could finally get financing in place to adapt the book, and during that time, they never discussed their vision of the film? Apparently, di Bonaventura imagined some young-skewing, kinetic action picture with a hunky lead, but in Rourke, Carlo sees the film as the story of a wisened tough guy veteran with no time for bullshit.
Channing Tatum is 29 years of age, and he would be playing a guy who was said to have murdered 200 people. We’re not sure how often Mafia hit men work, but we’re sure a crime family like the Gambinos, who the real life Ice Man worked for, would have employed more than one. Considering their power structure, they probably wouldn’t have had that many enemies over a short period of time. Kuklinski claims he killed around 130 after joining the profession (did he kill 70 people as a kid?) over a 30 year period. The math clearly worked in favor of a man named Channing starring in a movie as a hitman in old man makeup, so we may have dodged a bullet.