Vaughn is 45 in a fortnight.Īnd Wilson too is having a rethink. Speaking to Variety, Vaughn said he was “moving into a more adult part” of his career. Vaughn, too, has turned to HBO for salvation: the second season of hit crime show True Detective will see him play a career criminal alongside Colin Farrell (another actor in need of a hit). His next lead is on the small screen, starring alongside Tim Robbins in The Brink, a comedy about a geopolitical crisis. After that, Ferrell reunites with his Other Guys co-star Mark Wahlberg – a lone wolf outside the Pack, who manages to straddle comedy and drama – for Daddy’s Home (about a stepfather forced to compete with his wife’s ex-husband).įerrell’s continued chances to shine have, however, eluded Jack Black, who, bar the odd cameo, hasn’t headed up a film since 2011. It’s a smart match, given that Hart’s fanbase – including 17.4m Twitter followers - has helped him score a string of recent hits. Later this month he teams up with Kevin Hart for Get Hard, playing a businessman preparing to enter prison. Yet despite this, Ferrell is increasingly unable to carry a comedy by himself. Plus, when it comes to opening tentpole releases, Ferrell is the obvious exception in the group, with solid returns for Anchorman 2 and The Campaign. Yet such projects have never landed resoundingly, and he keeps scuttling back to more bankable ground. The actor has made numerous attempts to break the mould, from Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda to Everything Must Go, an adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story. But that inventive, whimsical tale of a man attempting to save his life from inevitability didn’t click with Ferrell’s core audience, despite strong reviews. A pricey passion project for Stiller, who also directed, it confused fridge-magnet insight with profundity and wound up a pale imitation of fellow Frat Packer Will Ferrell’s underrated and under-watched 2006 comedy Stranger Than Fiction. It certainly suits him better than his last attempt to “go straight”, 2013’s once-Oscar-tipped remake of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Allstar Collection/NEW LINE Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in The Wedding Crashers. It’s a perfect fit for the star, almost uncomfortably so, and he delivers arguably his greatest performance. Stiller’s character in the new movie alternates between craving acceptance from his sophisticated elders and admiration from hipsters 20 years his junior. It’s a reunion for the director and Stiller, who he took to dark (if financially unrewarding) heights in Greenberg another film about the gap between being an adolescent imitating an adult and the terror of bill-paying, dream-burying responsibility. The need to age gracefully is acutely explored in Noah Baumbach’s comedy While We’re Young, out in the UK at the start of next month. Reuniting Wilson and Vaughn eight years after Wedding Crashers, the jokes – mainly of the “they’ve never even used a webcam before!” variety – served as an uncomfortable reminder of the divide between the stars on screen and the target demographic. Google-funded flop The Internship highlighted the Frat Packers’s misstep in this respect. The ever-crucial younger crowd, relied on by studios to come out in force on the increasingly-important opening weekend, have diminishing interest in watching men not far off 50 imitate children. In the 11 years since the Frat Pack was christened, and the 18-odd since it formed, the climate of comedy has inevitably changed. Jack Black’s appeal went south after Year One and The Big Year (note to Black’s agent: avoid titles with “year” in them), while Owen Wilson man-child comedies Hall Pass and Are You Here barely registered. When he aimed his laughs at those nearer his own age (remember Tower Heist?) the response was much more muted. Ben Stiller wisely chased those who now only went to the movies with their kids, with family-friendly franchises such as Madagascar and Night at the Museum. Then the laughs dwindled and fans dissipated. Their films included Starsky & Hutch, Anchorman and Tropic Thunder and it seemed – for a while at least a few halcyon days in the mid-noughties – that the whole world over was happy to lap up the Pack’s output. In 2004, the term “Frat Pack” was coined by USA Today to describe a group of actors who were then starring alongside each other in a string of hit comedies.
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