Thomas Jane vs. Aaron Eckhart
Battle of the Lanky Second Leads

In Hollywood, everyone's attractive.

(Well, actually, everyone's attractive except the ugly people -- the ones who occasionally get cast in movies alongside the attractive people, and appear for the sole purpose of making the attractive people look even more attractive by comparison.)

In a population in which basically every single person is extraordinarily good-looking, it's a mathematical inevitability that there would be a few people who are good-looking in exactly the same way. In this space, we have documented such cases: Christopher Meloni and Elias Koteas and Jamie Kennedy and Seth Green.

When the 2 Stars fighting it out for the same 1 Slot are evenly matched in their physiognomy, the winner may actually be determined by talent. And in this case, that spells bad news for Thomas Jane.

Because, in many respects, Thomas Jane has it pretty good right now. He was one of the many young bucks filling out the cast of The Thin Red Line. He's showed off his pecs in the big, dumb action movie Deep Blue Sea. He learned to bat for the HBO movie 61*. And he's apparently taken up residence in the stable of Paul Thomas Anderson.

The only problem with Thomas Jane's ascendancy is that anything he can do, Aaron Eckhart can do better. He appeared in the intense suspense thriller The Pledge, directed by Thin Red Line co-star Sean Penn. He starred in Any Given Sunday, a big, dumb action movie directed by a man who still has some tiny amount of artistic integrity (Oliver Stone) as opposed to Jane's Deep Blue Sea helmer (oh, Renny. Poor Renny). He's squired around both Julia Roberts (in Erin Brockovich) and Gwyneth Paltrow (in the upcoming Possession) -- arguably the top two hottest actresses in contemporary film. And, sure, Paul Thomas Anderson's all right and everything, but, hi, Aaron Eckhart went to college with Neil LaBute.

Then again, we keep hearing these troubling stories about Eckhart -- that he's insulting people at parties and generally acting like maybe he spent a little too much time with Jack Nicholson on the set of The Pledge. But he's such a good actor, and we've enjoyed his work so much, that we don't want to believe such stories are true. Or, if the stories are true, Eckhart was just researching the role of yet another sociopathic troglodyte for LaBute's next movie. Or, if the stories are true, that the ass-ish behaviour was actually exhibited not by Eckhart, but by his shorter, blonder doppelganger, Thomas Jane, for whom we feel nothing.

Advantage: Game, set, and match to Eckhart.