And now a salute to one of the most over-rated (or frequently miscast) actors of our lifetime: Kevin Costner.
Costner has a unique acting style. It's basically this...he plays himself in just about every role that he gets. He has the shallowest range of any mega-salary actor that I can think of. Perhaps the most extreme example of CostnerStyle is the 1991 "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" which has Costner playing a more talkative and cheekier version of his "Dances With Wolves" character except that it's in medieval England. Yep, the voice, the mannerisms and just about everything but the script and the setting are the same. Inexplicably, someone or several someones who must include both the producer and director allow Costner to trudge through this role without an English accent. Costner instead sounds exactly like what he is in real life, a native Californian. The movie would have been more accurately titled, "Robin Hood: Prince of Surfer Dudes." They may as well have cast Eddie Murphy for the lead. It would have made as much sense. Maybe more. Also inexplicably, this movie made a lot of money. Go figure.
Here's the thing...Costner isn't (always) a bad actor but he is cast for a lot of roles (maybe 90%+) that he is ill-suited for. When he is cast correctly it usually comes off very well. For instance, "Field of Dreams" is more or less about a couple of grown up hippies who somehow end up owning a farm and, due to consuming way too much acid in the sixties they end up seeing invisible depression era baseball players. They must have removed the scenes where the hippie couple dump several hundred gallons of LSD into the drinking water of the nearby city so that thousands of other people are forced to share their drug addled hallucination but, hey, editing. Costner is extremely believable in this role and it is one of his best films.
Going the other way, though, Costner is patently ridiculous as the world's savior in both "Waterworld" and "The Postman." In both roles he is essentially wooden and uninspired. Both films are consistently in just about anyone's list of the worst movies ever made and for good reason. Someone must have told Costner that the secret to a "deep and intellectual" role is brooding. So he broods a lot in these movies. Plus he looks wistfully at the sunset. If that's not golden I don't know what is. Side note: "The Postman" is ridiculous on so many levels. Costner's character comes across a skeleton with a USPS uniform on and decides to strip it off of the bones and wear it. Sure. Maybe that uniform was made of some new non-rotting material but I'm guessing it wasn't. A lot more likely that some kids found a USPS uniform and thought it would be funny to dress up the skeleton. And then there is Tom Petty as the "mayor" of Bridge City. What on earth were they thinking? And they actually hint that Petty is playing himself 'cause you know that's what anyone would do...elect a rock star as your post apocalyptic town mayor. Sure. "The Postman" is bad. It's bad on dozens and dozens of levels. Waterworld is horrible, too, but "The Postman" just goes out of its way to insult your intelligence and be as offensive to rational thought as humanly possible. Total success there, though.
Actually, Costner seems to do pretty well in westerns. There was the aforementioned "Dances With Wolves," but there was also the very satisfying "Open Range" where he gets to do a lot of shooting of bad guys and ends up getting the girl in the end. And he was okay in Silverado.
Not that he is incapable of making a bad western. He had the title role in "Wyatt Earp" where he sucked hind tit. Plus, it was seriously overshadowed by the vastly superior Earp film, "Tombstone" where Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer were just plain outstanding.
One of my favorite Kevin Costner roles was where he played Alex in "The Big Chill." Probably his best work of all time. Incredible acting in that one. Should have got an Oscar. Oh, well.
Costner's first real big opportunity, though, was playing Elliot Ness in "The Untouchables" in which he was not merely bland but he was instead very bland. Put Costner in any film next to a real actor, in this case DeNiro and Connery, and he is immediately and automatically reduced to what he really is, a decent supporting actor. I never appreciate it when the people in charge of putting a film together allow the talent to be inexplicably mismatched (think Keaton/Nicholson in Burton's "Batman"). This is yet another one of those Costner film moments where you find yourself asking, "What were they thinking?" It would be one thing if the role had never been filled by anyone or if it had been previously filled by someone whose bland/boredom ranking was somehow greater than Costner's but as most of us know that just isn't the case here. When I think of Elliot Ness I'm thinking Robert Stack every single time, not Kevin Costner. You know what role Costner could do where he would be way more interesting than the original lead? He would be a much better Joe Friday than Jack Webb ever was in "Dragnet." Of course, my dog could be a more interesting Joe Friday than Jack Webb, too.
Roles in which Costner's signature bland acting seems to work well: "JFK" (yet another film where no one seemed to care about Costner's non-attempt to get into a regional character...Louisianan's and residents of New Orleans most definitely have unique accents) and "The Bodyguard" were both films where he played rigid, methodical, boring guys who occasionally do something interesting. More recently he played a very boring and not even particularly scary serial killer in "Mr. Brooks."
Never afraid to stretch as an actor...a boring and one dimensional actor...Costner has even managed to inject himself into sappy chick flick fare such as "Dragonfly" and the thoroughly noxious "Message in a Bottle." As bad as these movies were when they were released they have at least been surpassed in obnoxiousness by the execrable "Twilight" movies. Not that that's a recommendation to see them...it isn't.
So there it is...my Costner rant. With very few exceptions I just can't stand the guy as an actor.
