When Good Actor Meets Bad Movie

Chief among the pleasures to be found in movies like The Rite,The Eagle and Unknown is to see Anthony Hopkins,Donald Sutherland and Liam Neeson at work. Hopkins mutters,bellows and glowers his way through a kind-of-scary tale of supernatural mumbo jumbo. Neeson does some glowering of his own and strains the tendons of his neck almost to the breaking point in a story of rage and vengeance. Sutherland,in The Eagle,saunters through this would-be epic of ancient martial derring-do as a laid-back imperial Roman.

Sutherland is one of those actors whose eagerness for work has often walked the fine line between the eclectic and the indiscriminate. He can also be seen currently in The Mechanic,starring Jason Statham. Sutherland has been primarily a character actor. In The Eagle he serves as a temporary foil and mentor for Channing Tatum,the blunt and brooding star,whose dour quest to restore his family honour drives the narrative.

In the case of The Rite and Unknown,Hopkins and Neeson are the protagonists,and their unapologetic star turns are likely to provoke,if not controversy,at least skepticism. Hopkins,after all,was an axiom of the Merchant-Ivory glory days,in addition to embodying Hannibal Lecter and Richard Nixon. Neeson,having played the American sexologist Alfred Kinsey and the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins and given voice to Aslan,the Messianic lion of Narnia,sits squarely at the top of his profession. What are actors of such prestige and pedigree doing in pictures like these?

The suspicion is always that actors take such projects for mercenary reasons.

But is this really a meaningful distinction,or just an example of the cynicism that is often the flip side of our worship of movie stars? After all,while they will sometimes accept lower fees for passion projects, they do not make a habit of working for free. No man but a blockhead ever wrote,except for money, Samuel Johnson declared back in the 18th-century.

However,the present-day vogue for cultural non-professionalism has its benefits. Independent cinema American and foreign,mumblecore and neo-neo-realisthas been refreshed by the awkwardness and honesty that often characterise unschooled performances. And it is what good actors bring to movies,even bad ones: discipline,conviction,the ability to help us suspend our disbelief by persuading us that they believe in what they are doing. You might almost say that greatness shows itself precisely in the discrepancy between the performance and the material. If that is true,then it is something like a mathematical certainty that the greatest actor in the world today is Nicolas Cage.

His latest film,Drive Angry 3D is out next week. Cage has been an action star,a comic player and,in recent years,the American cinemas most popular and prolific purveyor of craziness. Critics have not smiled on Cages films of the past decade: he has anchored the juvenile action National Treasure franchise,and also science fiction and fantasy like Ghost Rider,and The Sorcerers Apprentice.

Cage may have been driven to some of this by well-publicised financial difficulty,and some of his admirers have surely been puzzled by his choices. But it can never be said that he phones in a performance. He is more likely to scream into the telephone,or smash it to pieces,or some other sublime and unpredictable piece of business. Just doing his job,in other words. A. O. SCOTT