From The Playlist’s review of last year’s “Corner Office”:
Because it’s so drab and one-note, “Corner Office” leaves the viewer with lots of time to contemplate the Hamm Conundrum. To wit: in Jon Hamm, we have an actor who seems genetically engineered for movie stardom, a chiseled slab of masculinity who wears a suit like he was born to it, and is a magnificent actor, plus possesses an admirable refusal to take himself too seriously. He seems born of another era, a time when icons like Mitchum and Wayne and Brando filled our screens, which is part of why he was so perfect for “Mad Men.” And perhaps that’s why he has yet to find a single feature film that suits his skills; as my friend, the film critic Sean Burns told me, he’s a man, and now they make movies about boys.
So perhaps that’s why, its many other virtues notwithstanding, it’s so depressing to see Hamm as the sputtering bureaucrat, a role that any one of a hundred other actors could’ve played, in “Top Gun: Maverick,” a movie about a (59-year-old) boy, and that’s certainly why it’s so depressing to see him succumbing to the temptation of actorly dowdiness in “Corner Office.”
I don’t like this “boys vs. men” rhetoric. It sounds to me like old people complaining that masculinity doesn’t mean the same thing to many millennials and gen z as it did to boomers. It is deliberately diminutive, engineered to be divisive.
I last saw Hamm in Maggie Moore(s) - he and Tina Fey seem to be doing John Slattery a favour by starring in it. Nick Mohammed also appears (inexplicitly in the American police, although so was Chris O’Dowd in Bridesmaids to be fair). I only have two types of movie reviews: “I watched to the end” or “I didn’t” and Maggie Moore(s) is a Type 2 Review.
Edit: Hey, you can’t downvote my comment on my own post. That’s not fair (I was planning on using those upvotes for something). Am I not contributing to the discussion? I made the flippin’ discussion! Where’s all your posts, huh?
