Luke Wilson may not have the most depressing career trajectory of guys who seemed like they were going to be hot stuff at the turn of the millennium, but there is something profoundly...discouraging about it. It's not a tragedy, like the fall of Lindsay Lohan, or anything. It's not even that he has his brother Owen's insane multi-medium talent—we'll never know exactly how much of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums he wrote, but I imagine Wes Anderson doesn't share credit lightly—and intense personal demons. But there's something so incredibly discouraging about watching him go from Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums to a somewhat puffy dude who shills for AT&T and takes roles ranging from the creepily misogynistic in My Super Ex-Girlfriend and Death at a Funeral to the just insanely bland, in stuff like Henry Poole is Here. It says a lot that I don't even remember him in You Kill Me, which I quite enjoyed, and that I'd kind of forgotten him in The Family Stone, which I think is underrated, in part because it insists that breast cancer survivors can still be sexy, and not just in a Samantha Jones kind of way.
All of which is a really long way of saying I am moderately hopeful and excited for Middle Men, in which Wilson stars as a family-man internet porn entrepreneur:
There's a wistfulness and opportunism to what we see of his performance here. It's not ever going to match this:
But maybe the whole point of Wilson's flailing is that nothing ever really could.