Brad Pitt: 5 Awesome Performances and 5 That Sucked
1. Cool World
When you compare this offering to modern Pitt fare, it's much like a lion riding a bicycle. You could conceive of the prospect and you might even find it hilarious, but deep down you'd know that it could never really happen. Getting a lion's paws on those stirrups would be just as far-fetched a prospect as Brad Pitt starring in a Who Framed Roger Rabbit ripoff. An entertaining thought, but an impossible one.
Well, it turns out it wasn't. Whilst lions have yet to master two-wheeled transport, Brad Pitt has starred in one of the worst films ever to hit the world at large. But much like us all, he made mistakes in his formative years; he was young and dumb, just starting out, willing to put his name to anything that looked like it had potential.
To be fair to him, for a time it did actually look like Cool World would've been an interesting idea. Director and writer Ralph Bakshi pitched a film to Hollywood about a hybrid being born to adult and cartoon parents, who travels into the real world to kill her absentee father. It was going to be the world's first horror cartoon, a sleazy, colourful romp that left you feeling dirty all over, in that classic film noir style. Again, maybe it wasn't a good idea, but damn, that's pretty interesting.
But then came a studio-mandated rewrite where Gabriel Byrne's cartoonist effectively bones one of his creations into flesh-and-blood existence. Digest that last sentence, if you will. Read it again. Yes, the actual premise of this film was that Byrne's character had a magic penis, and he just had to get his freak on with his own Jessica Rabbit-aping cartoon. It's essentially most of deviantART's wet dream, minus the Hippogriffs.
The job of Pitt's 1940s gumshoe (again, why?) job was to stop this unholy union from taking place, probably the very definition of a thankless task. It's just that the script is that special combination of wooden, fantastical and awful. As a result, it's hard for Pitt to come across as anything but awful. His motivation seemed to go something like this; I'm deadly serious, and so's my cartoon spider. When a cartoon spider's involved, the very premise of a film noir is invalidated by sheer lunacy. But the worst thing here is that he's not even on autopilot, he's just confused about his role in this mess. He, along with Byrne, are trying really hard to make this shocking material work. But much like you can't build an ice sculpture out of shit, you couldn't get a good performance out of Cool World. It was just a disaster zone.
It didn't help that the animation was so poor, especially for a Bakshi film. Whilst the film it was aping, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, managed to make it look like Bob Hoskins and Roger Rabbit were living on the same plane of existence, the film gives Pitt no favours, distracting away from an already troubled performance through a series of glitching errors and unnatural positions between the 'doodles' and humans. You ended up just wishing it would stop.
To put it lightly, the animation made him awful to watch, and the dialogue/premise made him awful to listen to, and this was compounded by real-life scenes so bad that they resembled one of those budget films you found on the mediocre film channels. For all intents and purposes, it looked as though Brad had stumbled onto that set by accident wearing a preposterous zoot suit he'd just fished out of a charity shop bin. It just seemed as if the film embodied the very thing that would become a common criticism of Pitt; that as an actor, he's all style, no substance. I don't often like to say it, but if you ever needed evidence for this claim, you didn't need to look any further than Cool World, a film so bad it dragged Pitt's considerable efforts down with it.