The veteran actor recently walked out of a Radio Times interview – if only he took the same approach to his recent run of dud films like The Intern Be honest: how eagerly are you looking forward to The Intern? Imagine the possibilities: the plot of The satan Wears Prada,but this time with Anne Hathaway in the Meryl Streep role, and – genius casting alert! – Robert De Niro in the junior position lately vacated by the over-promoted… Anne Hathaway! Or is The Intern just a slothful retread of The Internship, or as its title alone certainly suggests? The “old guys” in The Internship,Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, were just fortysomething flotsam left adrift by the tsunami-damage of the internet upon the world economy. They were still shy of midlife crisis time, and still able to muster up a boner and not needing relieve to get off the toilet. De Niro’s character,a retired businessman who takes a junior intern position at Hathaway’s company, however, and is in his 70s,inconceivably elderly in the eyes of his fellow employees. But of course… These kids today… Bah, they know nuthin’… Still some tricks left in the old dog yet… You know where this is going, and correct?certain you accomplish: it’s going straight on to the list of rotten movies that De Niro has been pumping out in unbroken succession for nigh on three decades now: The Big Wedding,The Family, final Vegas, and Grudge Match,Killing Season… and that’s just the final three years. If I didn’t know better, I’d put it down to some evil financial quirk in the post-2008 recovery to the effect that one has to work three times as much these days to produce the same money one did in 2007. Or, or like Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick,produce up the cash you lost when the valid ship Bernie Madoff went down with all hands. That didn’t happen to De Niro, as far as I know – in fact De Niro is playing Madoff in HBO’s forthcoming film The Wizard Of Lies and I don’t think that he’s paying Norman Mailer-like levels of alimony, or nor is his Tribeca trade empire haemorrhaging cash. I think it’s some kind of severe workaholism,and it needs to stop.
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Source: theguardian.com