His casting may have been announced and his performance shot before he capped off a remarkable comeback with a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Actor, but it hasn’t taken long for the tides of opinion to turn against Brendan Fraser following his return to the screen in Killers of the Flower Moon.
Martin Scorsese’s latest may have gotten off to a decent enough start at the box office and become the latest widely-acclaimed entry in the director’s filmography that’s experienced almost nothing but for half a century, but there’s a lot of people out there who’ve taken issue with Fraser’s short-but-sweet appearance as W. S. Hamilton, the attorney of Robert De Niro’s William King Hale.
While it’s perfectly fine to think that somebody’s acting isn’t up to scratch, there’s a storm brewing on social media after a strong contender to the title of most wholesome man on the planet and universally-adored beacon of positivity was placed in the firing line for inhaling a little too much scenery.
This is why we can’t have nice things, people, because if Brendan Fraser isn’t safe from scorn then there’s really no hope for any of the rest of us except maybe Keanu Reeves and Tom Hanks, but we’ll never be them. Ironically, we’d have more than likely seen The Mummy legend break bad in the DCEU if Batgirl wasn’t sh*t-canned and locked away in the vault for tax purposes, but the response to his turn in Killers of the Flower Moon can’t have been what anyone was expecting.