The Hot Corner

A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: Eric Cantona in “Elizabeth.”

All right, cinema and soccer fans, what is wrong with the following sentence?

Sir John Gielgud, Richard Attenborough, Geoffrey Rush, Eric Cantona.

Suiting up in 16th-century period garb for the new Working Title Films movie “Elizabeth” are distinguished thespians, Academy Award-winning artistes and the former starting central midfielder for Manchester United.

Imagine Shaquille O’Neal stumbling onto the set of a Merchant-Ivory production for a game of pickup elocution with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson and you begin to get the picture.

Cantona, who retired from soccer after the 1996-97 season, was undeniably a great player--a candidate for 1990s world player of the decade. Most Americans, however, know him as the nut case who attacked a heckler in the stands in 1995 and cleated him in the chest, although they have seen his distinctive arched proboscis in a couple of stateside Nike commercials.

(Cantona is the one whose ear is buzzed in the airport by the Brazilian national soccer team. And he’s the one who bids the Goalie From Hell “Au revoir” before blasting the ball through his otherworldly midsection.)

Cantona retired in ’97 to engage in loftier pursuits, such as “serious acting,” in roles that require him to wear nothing with a swoosh logo on the chest. In “Elizabeth,” Cantona is handed the not unsubstantial role of Monsieur de Foix, the French ambassador who tries in vain to arrange a politically expedient marriage between the queen and the Duke of Anjou. This consists of Cantona mainly grunting out a few stiff sentences in broken English and sadly shaking his head when the queen bursts in on the duke to find him entertaining his staff in lipstick, a wig and a dress--a veritable Rodman of the Renaissance.

Poor de Foix.

Poor Cantona.

One has to wonder what producer Tim Bevan was thinking when he cast Cantona, unless he needed an ace penalty-kick man for the post-wrap production crew kickaround. On the “Elizabeth” Web site, Bevan claims, “This was not stunt casting. It is going back to our original concept of not wanting to see actors popping up who had been seen in other ‘frock flicks.’ It was a deliberate strategy, and one that gives the film its freshness.”

Free advice: Check out Cantona instead on the popular home video “300 Manchester United Premiership Goals.” He was bloody brilliant in that.