As the film critic community continues to keep its jackboot on the throats of artists, ensuring original voices like Johnny Depp and Jerry Bruckheimer are silenced, who will dare stand up against their tyranny, besides the millions who go to shitty movies that aren’t specifically The Lone Ranger? Only the one man who has made it his personal mission to retroactively stand up to terrorism: Mark Wahlberg. Filmdom’s favorite walking bar fight took to the L.A. Times to say he sees how the media’s been looking at his friends, like maybe it thinks they’re queer or something, and maybe it wants to get smacked?
“First and foremost, the media is targeting all these movies. There’s intense scrutiny on us, way more than before,” Wahlberg said of this new zeal the press suddenly has for exposing the entertainment industry’s misdeeds and excess, rather than simply discussing its stars’ palatial homes, like in the Golden Age. Why, back then everyone was just excited to see the beautiful people, and grateful to have something to take their minds off polio, and a movie like The Lone Ranger would have been celebrated for providing both.
Still, Mark Wahlberg is nothing if not a reasonable, logical man, so he admits some fault for a movie’s failure might be laid at the feet of producers who spend close to $250 million on noisy spectacle and brand recognition, then hope audiences turn up merely to see expensive things destroyed. “They are spending so much money to pull the wool over the audience’s eyes with these effects-driven movies,” Wahlberg says. “It’s not like Jurassic Park, where you saw something groundbreaking and innovative and said ‘Holy … I gotta see that. Every end-of-the-Earth movie kind of feels the same.”
Wahlberg then turned to promoting the groundbreaking, innovative film he’s currently working on—the next in the Transformers series, in which giant robots threaten the end of the Earth for the fourth time. But our unfair media targeting aside, that’s different: “Transformers is a different thing. What Michael [Bay]'s been able to do is elevate the material and take the human element to a whole other place," Wahlberg said, pointing to “the father-daughter relationship” as well as, presumably, the place in the sky where the human element will be elevated by a giant robot.
But besides Michael Bay’s deep understanding of the human condition (VG+, some cosmetic damage from robots), Wahlberg also says the difference is, with Bay you can see every single dollar on screen (sometimes individually represented by sex toys), unlike a certain other, wastefully self-indulgent movie. “They’re spending $250 million for two dudes on a horse? Where’s the money going?” Wahlberg said of The Lone Ranger, once again making it clear he’s no fan of wasteful self-indulgence. If only Mark Wahlberg had been there, disaster might once more hypothetically had been averted.