There are some acting missteps that unfortunately flaw the film for me.
Harrison Ford is not very good in it—perhaps not a great actor generally. His pretending to be a nerd/fan in Zhora's dressing room is too cringey to watch it's so bad… I feel like I'm watching Mickey Rooney playing Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
And the actor that played Leon (Brion James) is also difficult to watch (he was a distraction in The Fifth Element as well).
Harrison Ford is not very good in it—perhaps not a great actor generally. His pretending to be a nerd/fan in Zhora's dressing room is too cringey to watch it's so bad…
Harrison Ford is playing Rock Deckard, a detective (not an actor) who hunts down artificial humans. At least to begin with, he and his fellow detectives don't have much respect for the replicants, so he thinks it will be easy to manipulate Zhora and get some information out of her before he kills her.
No, he's not. He's sushi, cold fish. He doesn't even know for sure if he's human. He can't be a good actor.
Actually, if he's a replicant made to believe he's human, he might even believe he was doing a good job, because he'd be clueless about what good acting is supposed to look like.
No, he's a replicant who believes he's a seasoned detective. Nothing Deckard believes about himself is true.
Or, if you believe he's human, his the typical hard-boiled detective, he did behave in the way Ford portrays in the movie. Not subtle, not particularly clever.
I thought Brion James was fantastic in The Fifth Element because he's one of the few slapstick outlets. He comes off as sorta military-scary, and ends up frozen like a Looney-Tunes popsicle in the freezer a few minutes later , and dead-pan military is a kind-of-funny partner to Corbin being an outlaw bachelor. He then remains the dead-pan receiver of abuse from the president, etc.
I agree about Harrison Ford, though I don't know who would've done it better at that moment in history.
aside : The Fifth Element is considered to be one of the noisiest distracting sci-fi movies ever, so to hear your main distraction was Brion James made me grin.
Huh? Between Kassovitz trying to rob Corbin, the priest's sidekick, the head scientist, the archeologist with "Aziz, light!", the Chris Rock character, Corbins "fake wife" suggestion, the space port ticket counter gags, the president, and several others, the movie hardly has "few" slapstick outlets.
Right, they're all over the place. That's just the kind of movie that it is, And to the extent that he serves as one of the distractions, it's complementing the tone and vibe of the movie. Like I wholeheartedly agree that he was a perfect fit for that movie, but not because he was one of a small handful of slapstick elements.
> And the actor that played Leon (Brion James) is also difficult to watch (he was a distraction in The Fifth Element as well).
Wow, couldn't disagree more. I mean, Brion James wasn't a good actor, but he aced his role of Leon. Leon is weird, awkward and insecure, while also capable of great violence... which fit Brion perfectly.
Yeah, I would go so far as to say highlight of his career. Extremely, extremely good, like can't look away good. I suppose it's all just opinion at some level, but this is sticking out like a sore thumb is perhaps the hardest one to defend that I'm seeing in the whole thread.
I remember so many details of his brief appearances in that movie, but what really stands out are his eyes -- intense, fearful, paranoid, menacing. (Suitable, given that scene where Deckard and Leon extract J. F. Sebastian's name.)
He almost always played a thug or heavy, and so I'm not sure what other film of his could have ranked higher than this. His scene sitting across the table from Holden is classic.
I don't remember him playing a heavy in The King is Alive, which is not a classic but a rather dark Dogme 95 film, of all things.
Harrison Ford is not very good in it—perhaps not a great actor generally. His pretending to be a nerd/fan in Zhora's dressing room is too cringey to watch it's so bad… I feel like I'm watching Mickey Rooney playing Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
And the actor that played Leon (Brion James) is also difficult to watch (he was a distraction in The Fifth Element as well).
My only complaints though.