Despite the many funerals of war veterans that Jodie Foster picketed to get Mel Gibson the role of the tattoo artist in The Hangover Part II, she has ultimately failed. It was just been announced that Gibson has been replaced by Liam Neeson, due to the cast and crew’s anger over the fact he thinks puppetry makes antisemitism okay WHEN IT DOES NOT. (Puppetry only makes antisocial tendencies and store-bought pie crusts okay.)
Neeson told Variety the opportunity was presented to him by his The A-Team co-star, Bradley Cooper, a while back when they were shooting together and they were taking a break and eating Snickers bars while jumping on their pogo sticks together. But this morning, he officially accepted the part — he said, “I just got a call to do a one day shoot for Hangover 2 as a tattooist in Thailand, and that’s about all I know about it. I just laughed my leg off when I saw The Hangover, I was shooting in Berlin earlier this year and rented it on a hotel TV.” (He watched The Hangover in Berlin instead of going downtown and paying a nice lady $17 to give him a “hangover?” Ugh, old Hollywood might as well band together and just go tell everyone to get acquainted with their dictionaries.)
Yesterday, director Todd Phillips said, “I thought Mel would have been great in the movie and I had full backing of Jeff Robinov and his team. But I realize filmmaking is a collaborative effort, and this decision ultimately did not have the full support of my entire cast and crew.” Wrong, sarong! Gibson only would have been good if his character brought up everything that happened to him in real life. That would have been funny. But he’d never let producers allude to his drunken rants against female police officers with their breasts of candy corns because he’s Mel Gibson, and the fact he questions religion so openly means he seeks to be one of those people who never does anything laughable or deplorable, or anything that grows funnier with time…which means his cameo would have sullied everything because he’s superior to hangovers in general.
So this is a good thing. Mel Gibson can keep doing what he likes to do, which in its most basic form used to be beating his ex-girlfriend while she was holding their baby, and Liam Neeson can start doing what he likes to do, which is pimp himself out to successful projects that will help his kids get partnered with the prettiest girls in their classes for book reports on James and Dolly Madison.
Source: Variety
