Perhaps perturbed that other A-List offspring like Jaden and Willow Smith have already managed to become more famous than he is, Colin Hanks is finally breaking out, Emma Roberts style! After toiling away in numerous thankless roles — his turns in “King Kong” and “The House Bunny” hardly set the planet on fire — Yahoo! Movies has debuted the trailer for Hanks Jr.’s biggest role since 2002’s “Orange County”, a serial killer comedy “Lucky“.
The trailer is all broad strokes. After winning the lottery by chance, a would-be psychopath uses his new funds to indulge in an unsavory hobby: knocking off blondes in his spare time. Once his new gold-digger wife, Ari Graynor, becomes wise to his macabre schemes, presumably things begin to spiral out of control with hilarious consequences. The script, penned by “Saturday Night Live“‘s Ken Sublette, began shooting in late 2009 but is only now seeing the light of day. A battle-scared Ann-Margret shows up looking like the world’s most satisfied plastic surgery patient, whilst the ever-dependable Jeffrey Tambor puts in a turn.
There’s a sub-“Dexter” vibe that the trailer is obviously courting (coincidentally, or perhaps not, Hanks will play another potential murderer in the upcoming sixth season of that show), and it’s a welcome reversal from the po-faced minister Hanks played in the second season of “Mad Men“. Whilst he’s unlikely to blaze a trail like his father has, he seems to fit the bill as a pallid social misfit, though it’s hard to take him seriously as a sinister killer.
‘Lucky”s director is a son of showbusiness himself, Gil Cates, Jr., and he’s been responsible for a string of indies – “$pent“, “The Mesmerist“, “A Midsummer Night’s Rave” and “Pass the Sugar” – that no one saw at the time or since. Maybe the family legacy has been tainted since his sister Phoebe dropped her bikini in everyone’s favorite scene in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High“. Whatever the case, the clan Cates is getting a new lease on life just as the long-awaited Summer of Colin begins later this year — “Lucky” hits theaters on July 15th. Take that, Connor Cruise.