Originally Posted by Lance McCool
Sean Connery
OVERRATED !
While he hasn't done much of note in the past fifteen years or so (
Finding Forrester and
Playing By Heart are decent performances, but not great), I think he proved he was a very good actor in the late '60s and all through the '70s, though no matter how many terrific films and good performances he turned out he couldn't seem to escape the whole Bond thing then. Too bad.
Go back and look at his early work with Sidney Lumet in
The Hill (1965),
The Anderson Tapes (1971),
The Offense (1973) and
Murder on the Orient Express (1975) as well as
The Molly Maguires (1970 - Martin Ritt),
Robin & Marian (1976 - Dick Lester),
The Great Train Robbery (1979 - Michael Crichton),
The Wind & the Lion (1975 - John Milius) and most especially my favorite
The Man Who Would Be King (1975 - John Huston). Connery was a damn fine actor taking all sorts of roles and excelling at them, but by in large the films and his work in them went ignored or underappreciated. Too bad.
Time Bandits (1981 - Gilliam) then
Highlander (1986 - Russell Mulcahy) and
The Untouchables (1987 - DePalma) seemed to really kick off his second career (and even won him that Oscar) as aged supporting player, hitting a high-point with
Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade (1989 - Spielberg). And though he did a few more very good films as a star in this period with
The Name of the Rose (1986 - Jean-Jacques Annaud),
The Hunt for Red October (1990 - John McTiernan) and
The Russia House (1990 - Fred Schepisi), unfortunately he started leaning more towards jobs that didn't challenge him but paid hefty sums. This leads to disposable crap such as
Medicine Man (1992),
Rising Sun (1993),
Just Cause (1995),
The Rock (1996),
Dragonheart (1996) and
Entrapment (1999) as well as the all-out embarassing disasters
Highlander 2: The Quickening (1991),
The Avengers (1998) and
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003). Egads.
If all he's interested in doing at this point is collecting paychecks for steaming piles of FX-laden turds, that's sad. But the better filmmakers of world cinema will still come knocking on his door from time to time, and when they do I'm sure he'll answer. In those opportunities in coming years, I'm sure he'll prove all over again he can act. Were he given good material like his friend Michael Caine still gets every once in a while, something like
The Quitet American, I'm sure he still has the chops to pull it off.
Anyway, track down some of the greats I mentioned from the '70s. He is much more than Jimmy Bond and Henry Jones Sr., and if anything he is consistently
underrated as an actor. Don't get hung up on the fact that he got his Oscar for
The Untouchables. It was one instance among many of the Academy honoring somebody for their body of work and longevity more than the actual performance engraved on the statue (shocking). Big frippin' deal. Your venom should be aimed at The Oscars, not Connery.