Having caught about 45 minutes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the early morning on the SciFi channel (with all that feel good nakedness removed, of course), I got to thinking. Specifically, I got to thinking about Gary Oldman starring opposite Keanu Reaves.
I mean, has there ever been an actor so good paired with an actor so, so bad? Unless Adam Sandler co-starred with Kevin Branaugh and I missed the memo, I really can’t think of any pairing that is more staggering than those two. I’m betting you can’t trump it, either. But let’s have a list of incredibly shitty actors somehow paired with great ones, to see if we can.
Gosh, I can think of plenty of actors WAY worse than Keanu Reeves who’ve been in movies with great actors.
Arnold Schwartzenegger, just by himself, has been in movies with James Earl Jones, Laurence Fishburne, Emma Thompson, F. Murray Abraham, Mercedes Ruehl, Ian McKellen, Jim Broadbent, James Coburn, George Clooney, Gabriel Byrne and Robert Duvall, any one of which is a damn sight further from Arnold than any living actor is from Keanu Reeves.
Punch-Drunk Love showed that with a good script, a good director, and sufficient motivation, Adam Sandler can turn in a serviceable performance. I don’t think Keanu Reeves has ever demonstrated this capacity.
Whoa. I’m actually going to disagree with you there. There’s something playful and less infuriating about Arnold than Keanu. At least to me. I mean, in his early movies, Arnold barely even talked, then basically spent the remainder of career delivering timely puns. Keanu, on the other hand, tries at English accents and when he waxes philosophical (the Matrix comes to mind), nothing is less believable. I think the difference is that no one takes Arnold (the actor, not my governor…shudders) seriously while, Keanu seems to try to be taken seriously. Which is just sad.
Respectfully disagree. The prosecution contends that Mr. Reeves actually overacts and present several exhibits to forward this point. Among them: The Matrix, Point Break, Chain Reaction, and, the piece de resistance, Johnny Mnemonic.
In the interest of full disclosure, the prosecution has only seen Feeling Minnesota from the above list, which was also flabbergastingly horrific.
please tell me you’re not calling Nicholson a “great actor”? He, like Reeves, is always the same (whether that’s underacting or bad acting is debatable) Even in “As Good As It Gets” he was bland. Opposite Helen Hunt, that worked. And it also worked to show Greg Kinear had taken some acting lessons since “Sabrina” and that stupid Christmas movie about the con-artist turned postal worker (“Dear God”?)
Of those, I’ve seen only I Love You to Death, and I can’t say I remember too much about Reeves’s performance in this movie. I only remember that William Hurt was fantastic.
I’ll have to completely disagree with you on this one. In Dracula and Much Ado About Nothing, the term “underact” is totally inappropriate. In fact, a major part of the problem with Reeves’s performance in these movies is that he is visibly trying to act and failing miserably.
Jack Nicholson knew how to act. Sadly, we’ll probably never see it again. He seems content now to just play Jack Nicholson. I would say that from The Witches of Eastwick onward (inclusive), he gave up acting and started parodying.
I like Keanu Reeves. There, I said it. I thought he was great in Much Ado About Nothing and I really liked him in Constantine. I also liked him in Point Break, The Matrix and My Own Private Idaho. I also liked him in Parenthood and of course Bill and Ted’s etc. I get much grief about this from my friends. But I stand by my opinion.