A lot of us are probably looking at Laura Harris and thinking that she’s only so old and then realizing that we’re getting that old too since we can remember movies such as Suicide Kings and The Faculty. The trick is that a lot of us can remember that stuff like it’s yesterday when in truth it’s been well over two decades since those movies came out. Harris has been retired since 2016, which means that she did hang in there for a while and pushed her career for a bit, but it would appear that she was ready to step away and call it good for now. Whether or not she’ll ever be back is hard to say, but it’s likely that people shouldn’t be holding their breath while anticipating it since once a person gets over the age of 40 it’s likely that they’re not going to come back unless there’s a very good reason to do so. There’s always a chance of course since it could happen that she might miss the spotlight, but seeing as how she never really became the starlet that some folks might have thought she would be, it’s also easy to think that she might end up just staying away since getting back into the swing of things might be a little rough simply because Hollywood isn’t really something that a person just gets back into, at least that’s the thought.
She did manage to do quite well in the two movies that were mentioned since in The Faculty it’s really only by becoming paranoid that one would have thought that she was the alien queen by deducing that things started to happen once she showed up. There were things she said too that should have been red flags, but the reveal was still something that might have taken some folks off guard if only because of the way it happened. But the movie showed a rather interesting caricature of high school that a lot of us might have laughed at since high school coaches don’t normally fly off the handle as Robert Patrick’s character did, nor do a lot of teachers make it obvious that they have a serious drinking problem as one of the other teachers did. There were so many glaring errors in the movie that one had to assume that some of them were there on purpose, while others were possibly just made to be over the top to show what that particular high school was like. In a way, it definitely appeared to be a high school with a very low budget since this was even made clear in the beginning when the principal was sitting down with a few teachers in order to discuss why they couldn’t get the materials or do what they wanted. Like it or not, there are high schools that give generously to their sports programs but are extremely tight with the budget when it comes to other programs.
Her other big appearance in Suicide Kings, which came out a year before The Faculty, had an outstanding cast and kind of went under the radar since not a lot of people knew about it back in the day. The plot was fairly simple but still kind of awkward since it involved her character, Elise, being kidnapped to cover a debt that her brother had incurred, while two kidnappers would take the credit for her capture and demand $2 million dollars in ransom. The money would then be taken by Elise and her boyfriend Max as they would be leaving the country, and the whole thing about no one being hurt was kind of a fib that they wove to get people to go along with them. But along the way, they involved a retired mobster played by Christopher Walken and held him hostage in order to make the whole plan work. The only problem is that old mobsters aren’t usually the type to forgive and forget, so by the end, everything was mucked up to the point that no one knew what was going on, but Walken’s character was able to sort it out and kill Max and Elise right before the credits rolled.
It’s difficult to say that she wasn’t entirely effective as an actress since she was interesting to watch and she did add something to the movies that she was a part of, but at the same time, she was paired up with those that felt as though they had a great deal of personality that kind of drowned her out in a way. Plus, if you’re in a movie with Christopher Walken it’s likely that you’re going to be considered an afterthought unless your own fame happens to be just as great, if not greater, than his. But at the very least one can say that her career was solid up until her retirement.
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