Went Bad In... Mr Brooks Like most on this list, Kevin Costner is good at being good. Even when Hollywood forgot how good he was at being good, he was still definitely good at it, despite what over-riding responses to Waterworld and The Postman might suggest. On the back of his show-stealing performance in Man Of Steel, Costner's star is now once more in the ascendancy, as we all begin to remember exactly why he was once pretty much the biggest deal in Hollywood, but for a while, in the wake of The Postman's over-blown mess in 1997, Costner was considered something of a toxic commodity. Between 1997 and 2007, when Mr Brooks came out, he made just nine "real" movies, and none on the scale of most of the sixteen he had made in the decade previously, and it's fair to say he wasn't such a big deal anymore. That relatively "quiet" period gave Costner the relative freedom needed to express himself in a new way, and the result was the excellent, twisty Mr Brooks (which owes a lot to Dexter) a suburban serial killer thriller, which reinvented Costner's image, and suggested he had far more range than had previously been plumbed. The film was supposed to lead to two sequels, but they ultimately ended up benched, and Costner has gone back to more virtuous roles, but there is more than enough in Mr Brooks to suggest that the property deserves to be revisited, and that Costner deserves to dust of his horns again.
Went Bad In... Mr Brooks Like most on this list, Kevin Costner is good at being good. Even when Hollywood forgot how good he was at being good, he was still definitely good at it, despite what over-riding responses to Waterworld and The Postman might suggest. On the back of his show-stealing performance in Man Of Steel, Costner's star is now once more in the ascendancy, as we all begin to remember exactly why he was once pretty much the biggest deal in Hollywood, but for a while, in the wake of The Postman's over-blown mess in 1997, Costner was considered something of a toxic commodity. Between 1997 and 2007, when Mr Brooks came out, he made just nine "real" movies, and none on the scale of most of the sixteen he had made in the decade previously, and it's fair to say he wasn't such a big deal anymore. That relatively "quiet" period gave Costner the relative freedom needed to express himself in a new way, and the result was the excellent, twisty Mr Brooks (which owes a lot to Dexter) a suburban serial killer thriller, which reinvented Costner's image, and suggested he had far more range than had previously been plumbed. The film was supposed to lead to two sequels, but they ultimately ended up benched, and Costner has gone back to more virtuous roles, but there is more than enough in Mr Brooks to suggest that the property deserves to be revisited, and that Costner deserves to dust of his horns again.