Best & Worst of Gary Oldman

Article by Gabe Zia

So once again, I'm looking at the best and worst films of a certain actor. This weekend, we've got the highly anticipated Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, starring Jason Clarke, Keri Russel, and my personal favourite actor, Gary Oldman. He's shown an incredible amount of versatility with his roles, as well as unmatched talent.

Gary Oldman as Dreyfus in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

He has had some of the greatest performanes ever to be put on a screen, ranging from the subtle and emotional character in The Dark Knight, to the crazier and more evil characters like Dracula. Hiss best performance, in my opinion, is the sadistic and psychotic Norman Stansfield, the villain of the film Léon: The Professional.

Norman Stansfield

Most of the time, I'd talk about about all of the aspects of the film, but I'm mainly going to focus on his performance here. A lot of people call him out for overreacting, but I think this is one of the most brilliant and well captured performances of all-time. The over the top nature of the character adds a sense of dread to him, because the way people react to him shows this is intentionally crazy. He's out of the ordinary, and his actions only make this show more. Some characters steal the scene, but this guy completely stole the show. It's one of the most memorable performances of all-time, and that's why it's his best film.

His worst is a tough choice, he's got a shortage of terrible films, or even films that are that bad. Most people go with Red Riding Hood, or Paranoia. I'm going to go with a film I just cannot stand, Lost in Space.

I didn't notice until right just now that Gary oldman always has that goatee in almost every role he's done.

Simply put, this film sucks. It's annoying, a convention of cliches, it's poorly acted from the whole cast. Yeah, this movie is so horrible, it makes Gary Oldman seem like a bad actor. The writing sucks, the story makes no sense, and nothing any character says is even remotely close to normal human speech. The special effects are horrible, the film's backstory doesn't work with the plot, seeing as how it starts out saying we have peace, but then cuts to a space battle. Everything about this film only works to make this film absolutely suck. A film this bad is usually entertainingly bad, like The Wicker Man, right? Wrong. Much like White House Down or Jack & Jill, this movie is so terrible it goes around good and comes back to bad again.