Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Stiff

Or, in other words, Hayden Christensen.

Good lord, he is unbearable. His acting is wooden, uninspired and painful to sit through. Never more so than when he is sharing the screen with Ewan McGregor who studied Alec Guinness' inflection and comportment in order to nail his role as the younger version of the Shakespearean actor.

How could someone have been so woefully miscast? How did no one on the set notice? How did he not get fired in week three of filming? Most importantly, why did I spend my new years day night sitting through two-plus hours of him?

I netflixed the DVD because I wanted to see the movie that everyone said is "the best of all three recent ones," which I always considered to be an open-and-shut case of damnation with faint praise. I was right. When you make two big barking dogs for movies, and then the third one actually sits and stays (although not roll over, give you a paw, kisses or wag his tail), it's easy to feel a sense of accomplishment. Perhaps Geo Lucas did indeed feel that warm glow of viewer approbation. But I would counter that what he was feeling was palpable relief on the part of audiences who had become tired of cringing through something they had hoped to cheer through.

Yes, poor Geo Lucas. Great reviews for his movie, finally. But surely he had to know in his heart that, as our wonderful POTUS said, he was the recipient of "the soft bigotry of low expectations."