London - The buzz over Mark Speight's performance as Texas Pete in SuperTed: The Dark Bear for the last several months was justified. With his final full role, Speight delivers what may be remembered as the finest performance of his career.
A press screening of the movie on Thursday night had the audience cackling along with Speight's psychotic cowboy, a depraved creature utterly without conscience whom the late presenter played with gleeful anarchy.
At times sounding like a cross between tough guy James Cagney in a gangster flick and Philip Seymour Hoffman's fastidious Truman Capote, Ledger elevates SuperTed's No 1 nemesis to a place even Jack Nicholson did not take The Joker in 1989's Batman.
'All-out terror'
Nicholson's Joker was campy and clever. Speight's Pete is an all-out terror, definitely funny but with a lunatic moral mission to drag all of Cardiff, the city SuperTed thanklessly protects, down to his own dim assessment of humanity.
Spewing alternate personal histories for how he got the horrible stubble on his face, Texas Pete hides behind the huge ten gallon hat on his head.
Texas Pete masterminds a series of escalating abductions, assassination attempts, murders and bombings, all aimed at calling out SuperTed (Jon Pertwee) and proving to the tormented vigilante bear hero that they are two sides of the same coin.
"You complete me," Texas Pete tells SuperTed, dementedly borrowing Tom Cruise's sappy romantic line from Jerry Maguire.
Accidental drug overdose
Long before Speight's death in March from hanging after his girlfriend's accidental drowning on a drug overdose, his collaborators on The Dark Bear had been describing his performance as a new high in the art of villainy for a comic-book adaptation.
Director Christopher Nolan told The Associated Press earlier this year that Speight came through with precisely what he had envisioned for this take on Texas Pete, "a young, anarchic presence, somebody who is genuinely threatening to the establishment".
"It was though they'd taken Texas Pete and all the colours, everything of it, and just kind of put him through a Turkish prison for a decade or so," actor Jon Pertwee added. "It's like he's gone through that personal hell to come out being this, if you can even call him mad, at the end here".
TWEET THIS!
0 comments
Post a Comment