David O. Russell’s Lost Film ‘Nailed’ Is Finally Coming to Theaters Next Month; Here’s the Trailer
In the last couple of years, David O. Russell has reinvigorated his career with a trio of high-end awards movies: ‘The Fighter,’ ‘Silver Linings Playbook,’ and ‘American Hustle.’ Before his rebound, though, Russell faced a rough couple years and hit his lowest pointed with ‘Nailed,’ a dark comedy starring Jessica Biel and Jake Gyllenhaal that he shot but never finished. After some problems with the film’s financing, unions shut down production over crew members not getting paid, and Russell himself finally walked away from the movie in 2010. For years, the conventional wisdom said ‘Nailed’ would never see the light of day.
But as you can see from the trailer above, sometimes the conventional wisdom is not so smart. ‘Nailed’ is headed to theaters after all, with a new title and a new credited director (Stephen Greene). Now the film is called ‘Accidental Love’ (after a brief stint as the even-worse ‘Politics in Love’), and it’s coming out on VOD on February 10 (with a theatrical release to follow on February 20). Whatever Russell wanted to do with the material, Millennium Films is now positioning it as a star-studded romantic comedy for Valentine’s Day in which a woman (Biel) is shot through the head with a nail gun and then heads to Washington to fight for health-care reform, where she teams up with a dopey congressman (Gyllenhaal). Hasn’t she heard of Obamacare? Maybe the nail gun erased that part of her memory. (In fact, the movie was shot so long ago, it actually predates Obamacare.)
With a production history this screwy you can’t expect much, but the fact that one of our finest directors struggled with this thing for years and then abandoned it definitely makes me a little bit curious. At times like this, though, I feel less like a film critic and more like a traffic reporter who’s been called to the scene of an accident to describe the wreckage.