He may be best known for shilling overpriced laptops and being crushed by a fat girl in DODGEBALL, but Justin Long has landed a role that could solidly put him on the dramatic map. He’s joining Robert Redford’s THE CONSPIRATOR, the story of a Confederate sympathizer (Robin Wright Penn) who was tried in the Lincoln assassination, and a Colonel who reluctantly defends her (James McAvoy). Long is set to play McAvoy’s best friend, a soldier who lost a limb in the war.
My intro sentence aside (that was more a comment on my distaste for Macs than the actor himself), I’m actually a big fan of Justin Long. He’s a great comedian (my favorite role of his has to be the porn star in ZACK AND MIRI), but it is a legitimate question to wonder if he’s up to the dramatic task that this movie would seem to thrust upon him. Aside from comedy, I wouldn’t really say DRAG ME TO HELL or JEEPERS CREEPERS counts as drama either, so I wonder how this will pan out for him.
More pressingly, I wonder how this whole project will turn out for Robert Redford. Remember LIONS FOR LAMBS? Yeah, me neither, that’s what I mean. He was undoubtedly the Brad Pitt of his day, but I have yet to see evidence that he’s a director that can actually produce memorable films.
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