Colin Farrell is a guy you either like or dislike intensely, but hate is a very strong word. It’s tempting to put movies such as Phonebooth, Daredevil, and even S.W.A.T. on this list since he played such great roles in them, but the movies themselves were, for lack a better word, horrible. He does put in a great performance no matter where he’s at but it’s usually in some of the more obscure and unknown movies that he turns out some of his best material. The remake of Total Recall was something that a lot of people thought was going to be great and as Doug McQuaid he wasn’t too bad, but for some reason the film just didn’t fire on all cylinders as it traded a trip to Mars for a trip through the earth’s core, a place where science would suggest it’s simply not possible to travel through, even with science fiction on hand to explain it.
Here are some of his best movies to date.
5. Tigerland
There was a lot of opposition to the Vietnam War from those people that stayed home and even from those soldiers that went overseas. Bozz was just one among many that didn’t believe that being there was doing any good, but he tried and he tried to sway people to his side in order to see the truth about getting out. The only problem, the only REAL problem, that he had while being in was Wilson, and that was because Wilson was certifiably psychotic and was ready to prove himself by any means necessary, which might have meant killing Bozz if he’d had his way. At the end its presumed that Bozz is either dead or living in Mexico, but the audience is left to make up their own mind.
4. Crazy Heart
Blake is the kind of guy that wants the spotlight but can’t control his urges, mostly to drink. When his former student Tommy wants him to start writing again his need to hit the bottle becomes even stronger despite the fact that it would be a possible return to the spotlight and to the world that he so enjoyed. But of course bad habits have a way of waking people up to the reason why people stopped paying attention to them in the first place and eventually Blake does write a song for Tommy that becomes a rather popular track. Being older doesn’t mean much when you still have talent, as being broken down and hopeless is a choice, not a byproduct of anything else.
3. The Recruit
James has spent much of his life wondering what happened to his father and spending a lot of his time honing his skills in computers an analytics. When he draws the attention of Walter Burke he gets the chance to enter into a world that is built on half-truths and thickly-veiled lies and is known as the CIA. The moment he steps into the program there’s not a lot of solid ground to stand on since Walter plays him right from the start under the auspice that he’s seeking a mole in the agency that threatens to cause enough damage to seriously destabilize the agency from within. Unfortunately the mole turns out to be Walter, who is effectively turning the agents on each other.
2. Minority Report
In the future, Pre-Crime has become an effective way to lower the murder rate in the nation to almost zero since the precogs that determine who will kill who tend to be on top of every little thing that’s about to happen. The only problem is that Danny Witwer is convinced that there’s a flaw in the system, and while Chief Anderton is determined to prove that there isn’t the emergence of his own name as a murder suspect kind of belies the truth that there is a flaw and that it’s simple human error. The idea of predicting crime is great, but the one thing that’s forgotten is that being human we all have urges now and again that might seem too real to ignore.
1. Seven Psychopaths
There’s only so much realism a story can take without having to resort to something that will ground it back into the realm of fiction, though Marty’s tale, the title of the movie in fact, is something that a lot of people seem willing to get behind. It could have something to do with the fact that his friends Billy and Hans had a lot to do with it and have gone out of their way to give him the kind of inspiration that he needed to finish the story in the first place. But then having an adventure in which Billy becomes slightly unhinged and Hans is simply ready to call it a day only heightens the feeling of the story once it’s finished.
Colin certainly knows how to pick some odd roles, he does them so well.
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