Wait, is it career resuscitation time already? Doesn’t Quentin Tarantino wait like 20 years to revive an ailing or perhaps non-existent career trajectory? We may have dodged a bullet with Adam Sandler, but we caught one square in the mouth with Mike Myers.
Yeah, that’s right, those late-day rumors from yesterday turned out to be true. Mike Myers has been cast in Tarantino’s “Inglorious Bastards,” and we hate to continue being an apologist for QT’s bad-taste, but it is a rather small role.
Myers will play General Ed Fenech, a British “a military mastermind who takes part in hatching a plot to wipe out Nazi leaders,” says Variety. The plan is called “Operation Kino,” and yesterday we thought that maybe Myers would play Winston Churchill, who does make a brief appearance in the film and we were close. Churchill’s scene is the only one that also features Gen. Fenech. In this sequence, Fenech debriefs Lt. Archie Hicox (likely to be played by Simon Pegg; his character was a film critic before the war) and gives him his mission to rendezvous with the American ‘Bastard’ soldiers in Germany.
In the script, Fenech is supposed to be a whiskey drinking old George Sanders type circa the 1960 B-horror movie from Wolf Rilla’s “Village Of the Damned,”
Is “Inglorious Bastards” officially off the rails now in its casting? Maybe we’re naive, but the script has so much potential, we’re holding out hope. And Fenech is literally on screen for about 4-5 pages. If Myers keeps it in check, the sequence will seem like a gratuitous and glorified cameo, but nothing to ruin the film with.
But weird that Tarantino is hiring all these comedians to play roles. Pegg makes sense, cause they’re buddies and surely he’ll play the role like his serious cop performance in “Hot Fuzz,” but B.J. Novack, and now Myers? One thing’s for sure, QT still has the juice to draw big names for small roles, cause people just want to appear in his films no matter what. What an oddball he is in casting. Shouldn’t he have hired Myers ten years from now when he was doing “The Love Guru 4”?