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Bruce Hall: People like us always suggest that guys like Statham should branch out, and then when they do we usually turn our noses up at the results. Statham is an action guy. His movies may not crush the box office but they make money often enough to keep him and the people who hire him in business - and that's what it's all about. In the same vein, I think we're being too hard on Hopkins. It's easy to sit on this side of the camera and insist that great performers should only take great roles. If every great actor was like Daniel Day-Lewis and only came down off the mountain every thee or four years, would we be okay with that? Almost everything the man does is gold, but we hardly ever see him! Is that what we want? Most performers simply love to perform, and every project can't be a gem if you want to be in the game every day. The Silence of the Lambs doesn't come along every year and if you wait for it just to keep the critics happy, you may run the risk of working less. Even if you take a bad film, the only role you have to nail is yours. Don't be ashamed of a bad movie, be ashamed of a bad performance.

When you're at the beginning of you career you take whatever you can get, because just having your face in front of the camera is the important thing. When you're at the point where Hopkins is, you have the luxury of being able to pick and choose, so why not do something like The Wolfman just for kicks? Not everyone has as much money as we like to think they do, or accepts roles based on the same criteria we think we would, having never been in their position. As Michael Caine famously pointed out, sometimes you just take it for the paycheck. And when you're in a position to cherry pick, I see nothing wrong with doing something just for the work, just because you enjoy it. Is that wrong? I'll let you know next time someone offers me a UPS truck full of hundred dollar bills to do something that I love.

Edwin Davies: Hopkins' laziness because, even though Statham tends to star in films that blend together (with the exception of the Crank films, which you really can't mistake for anything else he has been in) he is often the best thing in them and he does bring a certain charm and presence to every project that suggests that he is putting at least a little bit of effort into his roles. Anthony Hopkins rarely seems as if he is trying these days, and that's pretty sad, really. Every so often he'll make a film like The World's Fastest Indian in which he delivers a good performance, but even then he doesn't push himself or try anything new. There's also the disparity between the levels of talent being wasted. I like Statham, but he has never given a performance on a par with Hopkins in The Elephant Man, Silence of the Lambs or Remains of the Day.

I'd be perfectly happy for Jason Statham to keep making fairly generic, dumb action films for the next ten years, but I'd be ecstatic if I saw a new film with Anthony Hopkins in where he was not only good but doing something we haven't seen him do a thousand times before.

Michael Lynderey: Neither. Both are a well-established practice in filmdom, with a lot of precedent. It's awesome to see an Oscar winner chewing the scenery in B-horror films. That's why I go see movies in the first place. And there's nothing wrong with Statham doing his thing and pleasing his fanbase. There aren't a lot of action stars turning out one or two low-budget escapades per year, the way they used to do it, so it's cool to see someone upholding the tradition, even if they're not always very good movies (and so what if they're not? that's expected). My point is that both of the phenomena chided by others here, to me represent just some of the reasons why I love movies.

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