Unless...
Last night, my wife and son and I watched Megamind. Now, don't think I'm mentioning my six-year-old to make an excuse for watching an animated movie. I love this movie. In fact, I think I like it more than my son does (though we're both big fans).
[Full Disclosure: I look a bit like Megamind.]
[And not, luckily, like Charlie Sheen.]
Will Ferrell's portrayal of a super-villain becoming a hero is pitch-perfect. (The running gag of Megamind's inability to pronounce specific words is brilliant, and in the extra features they credit that to Ferrell himself, though I can't believe he's solely responsible since a major plot point hinges on one mispronunciation.) But as I listened to some of Megamind's narration, I could hear echoes of Sheen's rant.
Megamind: "Our battles quickly got more elaborate. He would win some, I would ALMOST win others! He took the name: Metro Man, defender of Metro City. I decided to pick something a little more humble: Megamind, incredibly handsome criminal genius and master of all villainy!"
Sheen: "I'm sorry, man, but I've got magic. I've got poetry in my fingertips. Most of the time—and this includes naps—I'm an F-18, bro. And I will destroy you in the air. I will deploy my ordinance to the ground."
On his critics:
Megamind: "While everyone else was learning 'The Itsy Bitsy Spider', I learned to dehydrate matter and rehydrate it at will... Sometimes I felt like it was just me and Minion against the world."
Sheen: "They suffocated my soul, they hijacked my brain, they brainwashed my friends and my family. Now I hate them violently and I will use every soldier in my army to defend myself against them, 'cause they will come at me. They will come at me with all of their doctors and their talking heads and all their other freakin' loser clowns."
On his former ally:
Megamind: "I made you a HERO! You did the fool part YOURSELF!"
Sheen: "There's something this side of deplorable that a certain Chaim Levine—yeah, that's Chuck's real name—mistook this rock star for his own selfish exit strategy, bro. Check it, Alex: I embarrassed him in front of his children and the world by healing at a pace that his unevolved mind cannot process. Last I checked, Chaim, I spent close to the last decade effortlessly and magically converting your tin cans into pure gold. And the gratitude I get is this charlatan chose not to do his job, which is to write. Clearly someone who believes he's above the law."
On his own special-ness:
Megamind: "No matter what happened, I was always the last chosen, the odd one out, the black sheep... the bad boy. Was this my destiny?... Wait. Maybe it WAS! Being bad is the one thing I'm good at! Then it hit me: if I was the bad boy, then I was going to be the baddest boy of them ALL!"
Sheen: "There's a new sheriff in town. And he has an army of assassins... I'm not Thomas Jefferson. He was a pussy... We work for the Pope, we murder people. We're Vatican assassins. How complicated can it be? What they're not ready for is guys like you and I and Nails and all the other gnarly gnarlingtons in my life, that we are high priests, Vatican assassin warlocks. Boom. Print that, people. See where that goes."
On addiction:
Sheen: "I have cleansed myself. I closed my eyes and in a nanosecond, I cured myself... It's the work of sissies. The only thing I'm addicted to is winning. This bootleg cult, arrogantly referred to as Alcoholics Anonymous, reports a 5 percent success rate. My success rate is 100 percent. Do the math ... another one of their mottoes is 'Don't be special, be one of us.' Newsflash: I am special, and I will never be one of you! I have a disease? Bulls**t! I cured it with my brain, with my mind. I cured it, I'm done ... you don't look like you're having a lot of fun. I'm gonna hang out with these two smoking hotties and fly privately around the world. It might be lonely up here but I sure like the view, Alex!"
Megamind: "What can I say? Old habits die hard!"
Okay, it's not a perfect one-to-one. Still, "high priests, Vatican assassin warlocks" with "gnarly gnarlingtons" in his life including a guy named "Nails"? How is this not an attempt at comic book villainy? Sheen must be trying to escape one of the least funny shows to ever appear on TV. I get that. Two and a Half Men was terrible. It never did anything for the art-form, but it sure did a huge favor to Everybody Loves Raymond and The Cosby Show, which look like masterpieces of the safe sitcom sub-genre by comparison. And Sheen wants to keep working. All that private-jet-two-girlfriends living can't be cheap. Oh, and he's not funny. So he wants to move into playing the bad guy. He doesn't have the reach to play Iago, so he figures he can play a comic-book bad guy. All these interviews he's doing now are audition tapes. Suddenly they make more sense, right?
Unfortunately for Sheen, Ferrell already had the job, and he aced it. If Ferrell were Sheen, he'd be shouting, "Winning!" Except that's too annoying even for a character like Ron Burgundy. But maybe Sheen can get a gig in the sequel, Megamind vs. Narcissus the Raging Tool. That is, if anyone would want to risk a dime on a guy who might shut down production at any minute. I'm guessing his next bit of work will have really low overhead to avoid too much investment at the front end. Somebody will foot the bill for a reality show that's a spin-off on his ex-wife's.
Next up on the Train-wreck TV Express: Charlie Sheen: It's Not Complicated. Winning!
Heaven help us all.
