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Tenaciously DisappointingThe tragic squandering of Jack Black's awesomeness.

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So why is it that, somewhere deep in the starless night of the winter solstice of my soul-cosmos, I still detect the faintest glimmer of hope? Black's career seems to have reached the archetypal Jack Black moment: The inspiration artist is uninspired, repressed, imprisoned by the status quo. We've written him off. It's the perfect situation. If we're lucky, he's about to respond like he always did in the old days: to launch himself into the heavens and blow our minds with a kick-ass riff that no one but him ever could have seen coming.

If you liked this Assessment column, check out Backstabbers, Crazed Geniuses, and Animals We Hate, a collection of our all-time funniest, meanest, sweetest, and weirdest profiles.

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Sam Anderson is a writer living in New York. He can be reached at .
Photograph of Jack Black by Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images.
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