By Sean Burns
Clive Owen’s daddy issues are getting out of hand.
The tall, rakish Brit seemed poised for superstardom after his breakout role in Mike Hodges’ hard-boiled 1998 Croupier. Handsome with a seedy air of menace, Owen smoked a lot of cigarettes and chose his words carefully, sardonically purring quips with a palpable disdain for everybody else onscreen, and by extension the entire world.
We all thought he was going to be the next James Bond, or at the very least an international phenomenon.
But Clive Owen’s career seems to have fizzled out, to a point where he’s turning up in a knockoff, secondhand thriller like Intruders, which, after premiering at last September’s Toronto Film Festival, is finally making a brief pit stop in our area on its inevitable journey to a Redbox kiosk near you.
As is too often the case these days, Owen gives a negligible performance, tamping down his natural gift for sly insinuation and instead trying to be the world’s greatest dad.
The first line of every biographical article about Owen always mentions that his father was a failed country-western singer who abandoned his family when young Clive was only 3 years old.
While I usually hesitate to indulge in cheapjack Freudian explanations for why movie careers sometimes take oddball turns, there’s really not very much else to say about Intruders .
Look at all the times Owen has played a nurturing father figure, even begrudgingly shepherding the last bastion of humanity in his best role, Children of Men.
He also baby-sat in Shoot ‘Em Up, tried to pass himself off as an ineffectual family man in the altogether regrettable Derailed, and then fumbled with single fatherhood in The Boys Are Back. And even though everybody else has, let us not forget Owen’s turn as the outraged father of a teen girl targeted by an Internet sex-predator in director David Schwimmer’s never-quite-released Trust.
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