It’s a shame, too, because the message of the novel it’s based on is one we can all appreciate today: When society breaks down, there will be simple, pure value in a man who delivers the mail, who reminds us of a sense of community. The comparison the movie is clearly trying to make - that Kutcher is a young version of Costner - does Costner no favors, and all told, he looks a little irritated by it: Even at his worst, he’s better than “Ashton Kutcher mentor,” and he knows it.Īll right, first off, a movie that features Tom Petty, living in a dystopian near future, playing a character who is clearly meant to be Tom Petty several years after “the collapse of society” can’t necessarily be all bad. (Our favorite of this genre is Life on the Line, a movie in which John Travolta plays a guy who climbs telephone poles.) Here it’s the Coast Guard, with Costner saddled with the thankless role as the “senior chief survival aviation technician” who has to train young, cocky Coast Guard wannabe … Ashton Kutcher. It’s still not clear what this was ever supposed to be.Įvery dangerous profession gets its own movie. That movie (and we’ll get to that soon) is bad, but it at least has some dumb ambition. 3000 Miles to Graceland ended up being a massive flop and, arguably, a bigger career stain than The Postman was. This was when Costner was still reeling from The Postman, and it almost feels like a movie he made to be actively stupid and escapist. It’s not even supposed to be funny! It’s just a weirdly overly violent heist film featuring an unlikable, self-involved Costner (who looks bloated and tired) and a not-getting-out-of-bed-before-noon-for-this Kurt Russell running around and posing in the desert. It remains absolutely baffling that this movie - which features criminals disguised as Elvis impersonators, and, somehow, Jon Lovitz, Ice-T, and Paul Anka in the same film - isn’t funny. Costner, for all his white-guy pseudo-soulfulness, doesn’t play grief well. Joe has to find his wife’s spirit, through the dragonflies we think, but mostly it’s an excuse for Costner to go full saccharine and for director Tom Shadyac to indulge every last jerked tear. Here, he’s Joe, a doctor whose wife dies in a bus accident in Venezuela but keeps appearing to him in his grief, sometimes in the guise of a dragonfly and sometimes through creepy little children. He’s so understated that he runs the risk of being underrated.Ĭostner’s corn-poke earnestness is one of his strongest attributes as an actor, but when it does him wrong, it really does him wrong. The career milestones end up as high on the list as you’d imagine, but it turns out that there are more gems than you might remember. He would have been a killer candidate had he ever considered running for public office.Ĭostner has a new film out, Let Him Go, so we’ve taken this opportunity to rank 42 of his performances. Decency, idealism, common sense, a can-do spirit: Costner embodied these qualities with a no-big-deal air. In his prime, he articulated a rugged vulnerability that could make men weepy about his films. Your dad probably enjoys Kevin Costner, and maybe it’s a thing you share with your old man. In recent years, his greatest success has been with Yellowstone, his Paramount series that caters to the older demographic who has been supporting him since the Dances With Wolves years - the same folks who probably checked out his 2019 Netflix film The Highwaymen. All he’s done since then is keep working, switching between character-actor roles and starring vehicles that were often … well, let’s be generous and call them “interesting.” He would never again capture the Zeitgeist - never again captivate audiences the way Bull Durham or Field of Dreams did - but we feel fairly confident that most moviegoers still have a fairly favorable viewpoint of the actor-director. You know what happened after that: Waterworld severely dented his standing, and then The Postman made him a punch line. And, for a short time, he was the biggest thing in Hollywood.Ĭostner’s cinematic peak was relatively short - the late 1980s to the early 1990s - but he managed to amass two Academy Awards and a string of popular hits during that time period. He’s the dude you wouldn’t mind having a beer with. Bruce Springsteen is one of those guys, and so is Kevin Costner, who for decades has exuded a slightly square persona. There are some celebrities who so seem to represent American masculinity - well, straight, white American masculinity, anyway - that they feel carved out of granite and permanently decked out in blue jeans. Photo-Illustration: Vulture, Orion Pictures, Warner Bros.
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