Rachel McAdams, Stop Wasting Your Talent

Rachel McAdams is one of my favorite actresses. She's funny, down-to-earth, and has Neutrogena-commercial skin 24/7. She also keeps making the same sappy, soppy romantic dramas again and again, like the upcoming Passengers, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why. This is the girl who energized State of Play and brought nasty shrewy-ness to a new level in Midnight in Paris. So what is this obsession with making versions of The Notebook over and over again?Think about it. The Vow, The Time Traveler's Wife, About Time – these are all movies about a truly devoted man whose deep love for Rachel McAdams survives some extraordinary adversity (usually involving memory loss or time travel). Talk about typecasting. And Passengers is no different. The film centers on a man traveling to a distant colony planet in a spacecraft who wakes up 90 years before the other passengers because of a malfunction in his sleep chamber. Instead of going crazy and searching for a volleyball as a companion (a much better love story), he wakes up McAdams's character. The two, inevitably, fall in love. The classic formula stands: adversity, time, travel, and a "unique" love story.

Come on, McAdams! Get it together. You are a high caliber actress capable of winning an Oscar, so stop with this drivel. What happened to the razor-sharp wit that stole the show in Mean Girls or the heart-breaking earnestness that brought emotional power to The Lucky Ones?

Look, I love Rachel McAdams, so I hope the whole world goes to see Passengers and she continues to be a fixture on the film scene. I just hope she leverages that success into a more meaningful, diverse career. Or at the very least, gives us a little more of this: