Robert Patrick Dissed by The Marine
Oh, what a burn delivered to Robert Patrick in the trailers and TV ads for the schlocky WWE action catastrophe The Marine. He's all over it, slithering through the many and varied explosions and the tire-squealing car chases as the slick bad guy, looking like he's having a ball -- and looking like he's gonna be the only thing worth seeing in the flick -- and his name isn't mentioned, not even once.
Watch the Trailer
Now, granted, this is a World Wrestling Entertainment production -- the thought makes me guffaw something fierce -- and so naturally they're gonna wanna play up the musclebound numbskull who's "starring" in the thing, John Cena (who is not a wrestler, but plays one on TV). He's a terrifying lump of meat gallumping around, trying to emote as his movie-wife is kidnapped by Patrick and his gang of baddies -- and, frankly, I'd run away with Patrick, kidnappee or no, if I were lumbered with a mountain of beef like Cena, but this is fiction. And the voice-of-god-trailer-announcer guy is all "JOHN CENA! JOHN CENA!" as you'd expect. But there's a moment at the end, where it cuts to Patrick striding, all deliciously evil, in front of an explosion, not at all fazed by the boom, a real movie-villain bad-ass ... and there's the spot where the announcer is supposed to roar "and Terminator 2's Robert Patrick." And there's nothing.
One TV ad pays tiny homage to Patrick's geek cred: "This guy's like the Terminator!" one of Patrick's toadies cries about Cena's Marine at the end of TV Spot #1 -- cut to a sly glower from our boy Bobby. And that's it: that is the extent of the acknowledgement that Patrick is like unto a god among geeks for his performance as the liquid-metal T-1000, as well as for his taking up of the baton dropped by David Duchovny in the last couple of years of The X-Files as Agent John Doggett.
That's the really bizarre thing about how this flick is being promoted: Patrick's name is known and would be a selling point with the very crowd of action fans the movie is aimed squarely at. And it's not like Patrick doesn't have a sense of humor about himself and his work: he's quoted at the IMDB as saying, "I've been acting for 16 years. I've done 55 movies and, in all seriousness, there's maybe five that are good and the rest are crap." So it's hard to imagine that he asked for his name to be removed from the movie.
It's weird, but hilarious. I might have to check out the film purely as a show of support for the Terminator.
Watch the theatrical trailer and the TV spots at The Marine's official site.
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MaryAnn Johanson
minder of FlickFilosopher.com
