The Beef Says He's Sorry for Indy 4

Over at the LA Times, they've posted a very good little interview from Cannes with Shia LaBoeuf where he basically takes his share of the blame for the more lackluster parts of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Here's how he opens:

I feel like I dropped the ball on the legacy that people loved and cherished...If I was going to do it twice, my career was over. So this was fight-or-flight for me.

The "doing it twice" he's referring to is his appearance in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, in which he takes on the Charlie Sheen role of young man who idolizes Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko. And yeah, Shia, you do not want to imitate that career trajectory.

Here's another pearl from a guy who's probably not going to set foot on the Skywalker Ranch anytime soon:

You get to monkey-swinging and things like that and you can blame it on the writer and you can blame it on Steven [Spielberg]. But the actor's job is to make it come alive and make it work, and I couldn't do it. So that's my fault. Simple.

And here he outs Harrison Ford as a hater, too:

We [Harrison Ford and LaBeouf] had major discussions. He wasn't happy with it either. Look, the movie could have been updated. There was a reason it wasn't universally accepted.

And he even admits that his mentor Spielberg may not be happy about his comments:

I'll probably get a call. But he needs to hear this. I love him. I love Steven. I have a relationship with Steven that supersedes our business work. And believe me, I talk to him often enough to know that I'm not out of line. And I would never disrespect the man. I think he's a genius, and he's given me my whole life. He's done so much great work that there's no need for him to feel vulnerable about one film. But when you drop the ball you drop the ball.

Look, there's a lot of hater out there on the Interwebs for the Beef, which I've never really gotten. The thing is, a lot of people thought that when he was cast as the lead in Transformers or Indy 4, that he in some way didn't deserve to have such high-profile roles. Well, he himself has always said it was largely luck, and you have to remember that this guy had a lead role on Even Stevens, a really good kid show that he was great in. It's not like he came out of nowhere.

To me, he's never been the problem. He's been in some bad flicks, and some decent ones. When he was called upon to actually anchor one (Disturbia), he did all right. And this kind of honesty is really refreshing. The film was disappointing, there's no doubt about it, and it's better to step up and face the music than do the usual bullshit quote of: "I thought there were a lot of great elements in that film", etc.