Go ahead and now give the Academy Award for Best Lead Actor to Will Smith (Ali, The Pursuit of Happyness). It might not be a far-off assumption as we are on the cusp of Oscar season. I would wait to hedge my bets in Vegas entirely, but it might be worth taking a flyer without knowing much about the other players who might be up for the award. Smith gives the best performance in his storied career as Richard, the father of (then) future tennis greats Venus Williams and Serena Williams in Reinaldo Marcus Green’s (Joe Bell, Monsters and Men) King Richard.
Category Archives: Will Smith
Concussion (2015)
Continuing the theme of 2015 awards season movie releases failing to meet expectations because of the lack of emotional audience engagement comes Concussion, a true story dealing with the effects of professional football concussions. The movie, set in 1982 Pittsburgh, begins with one of the city’s most recognizable faces (Mike Webster of the Super Bowl-winning Steelers teams of the ’70s) living in his truck and slowly losing his mind. Mike (David Morse – The Green Mile, Disturbia) gives the most poignant performance in the entire movie. In a film where we could and should care for all sorts of characters, Mike is the only supporting character who drives out any emotion in us or allows us to feel any empathy. In just a few short scenes, Mike can convey to us that despite what his doctors say, he has significant life problems that are a result of something that happened to his mind from the time he retired in 1990 until the time frame at the start of the film (2002). His 14-year career included 150 straight games as a starting center from 1976 to 1986.
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Enemy of the State (1998)
1998’s Enemy of the State was, for the most part, the first film that the movie studios relied on Will Smith to carry. This was Smith’s seventh movie overall and the fourth where he was one of the big stars in the film. The other three were Bad Boys (where he had Martin Lawrence), Men In Black (where he had Tommy Lee Jones), and 1991’s summer blockbuster Independence Day. This was certainly not a make-or-break movie for Smith, but a domestic gross of $111 million and favorable reviews from the critics helped cement him in the Hollywood landscape, where he has remained ever since.