HARRISON FORD

Like other contemporary actors whose careers were built on youth and media hype rather than on strong and evolving acting skills, Harrison Ford has apparently hit the wall in late midlife. He’s past 70 now and looking worn-out, and worse, bored. In the past, aging leading men often re-invented themselves and worked into their ‘70s and even ‘80s, maintaining their onscreen energy by tackling new acting challenges. But despite several such attempts, Ford keeps making "action" films. I recently saw him in two movies separated by a decade, and what a difference that decade made. The less said of the movies themselves the better (THE DEVIL'S OWN is pretty good; FIREWALL is atrocious), but here's what I thought of Ford. In THE DEVIL’S OWN (1997), playing a righteous NY cop, he actually does some acting. He's no Olivier or Gielgud, mind you, but he does show some emotional range – even smiles once in a while. But in FIREWALL (2006), he plays a bank security specialist blackmailed by baddies into making a large cyber-withdrawal. Now in a situation like that, who would smile, but all Ford does in every scene is scowl. And it's a scowl that doesn't say, "Boy, am I worried about my family;" it's more like, "What the hell am I doing in this awful movie." It was said that Katharine Hepburn's acting ran "the gamut of emotions from A to B” – in FIREWALL, Ford's range is even narrower! INDIANA JONES? I refuse to see it. I prefer to remember the earlier ones. I’ve never been much of a Ford fan – always thought he was a mediocre actor at best. And now that he’s in a sixties, whatever talent he once had (yes, I know we all the big movies he’s starred in over the years) seems to have disappeared.