Afgelopen week uitte Shia LaBeouf al zijn onvrede over het eindresultaat van Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen (2009). De acteur die op dit moment Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps promoot in Cannes is nu ook erg kritisch over Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) van regisseur Steven Spielberg. Het blijkt dat hij geen groot fan is van de film.

LaBeouf tijdens een interview: “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.”

Ook meldt hij dat de film wel erg voorspelbaar was: “I think the audience is pretty intelligent. I think they know when you’ve made (slop). And I think if you don’t acknowledge it, then why do they trust you the next time you’re promoting a movie…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….We need to be able to satiate the appetite. I think we just misinterpreted what we were trying to satiate.

Zijn eigen prestaties vond hij daarbij ook geen doorslaand succes: 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.

Overigens is LaBeouf niet bang voor de consequenties van deze uitspraken: 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.

Opvallende uitspraken van de acteur die een grote toekomst moet hebben in Hollywood. Of dit soort uitspraken hem op langere termijn helpen is de vraag. Meerdere fans van Indiana Jones zullen zich overigens kunnen vinden in zijn kritiek. De vierde Jones (RT = 77%, IMdb = 6,6) was overigens een enorm financieel succes.