Now that Sir Ben Kingsley has worked with the great and powerful Dr. Uwe Boll (on 2005’s tremendously affecting BloodRayne), the temptation to call it a career and coast on His glory must be overwhelming. And yet Kingsley continues to work steadily and indiscriminately, hopping from one project to another with little regard to the quality of the material.
Take, for instance, Shutter Island, where he’ll collaborate with the very old and extremely overrated Martin Scorsese, who hasn’t made a decent film since 1972’s Boxcar Bertha. As reported earlier, it’s based on one o’ them Dennis Lehane glum-a-thons, and will star Leonardo DiCaprio (fervently struggling to recapture the magic of The Man in the Iron Mask) and Mark Ruffalo (they can’t all be View from the Top) as U.S. Marshals (hopefully in the vein of U.S. Marshals) investigating a prison escape on a remote New England island. The screenplay is from Laeta Kalogridis, who’s been for shit since Birds of Prey.
Shutter Island will begin production in March 2008 for Paramount Pictures. Fortunately for Kingsley, redemption appears to be in the immediate offing with his turn in Mike Myers’s The Love Guru as Guru Tugginmypudha.