You don’t want to make Tommy Lee Jones mad. Other than his questionable performance as Two Face in Batman Forever, Jones has always played dudes who seem on the brink of madness, as though they’ve had their anger and emotion pent up for years upon years. And it turns out, all it takes is something like a screenplay dispute to set it all off.
According to Variety, Tommy Lee Jones has walked away from The Lincoln Lawyer, a film he recently signed on to co-star and direct. The film is based on the Michael Connelly book of the same name and follows a mildly successful criminal defense lawyer who runs his office out of the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car. Matthew McConaughey is signed on to star. The movie is still on schedule to start filming next spring, so long as Lakeshore Entertainment can find another director and actor to commit to the job.
With Jones gone, this movie instantly becomes less interesting. The man brings certain credibility to any project he works on, and with McConaughey the only guy left to pick up the slack, the producers of the flick should be worried. They’re either going to have to sign up an equally respectable director or be content with the fact that they’ll probably get a lawyer movie about a slacker surfer dude who gets all of the ladies.
