It is hard to think of anyone besides Harrison Ford playing Han Solo, which partially explains why Solo: A Star Wars Story didn’t impress fans or critics. Likewise, Ford is absolutely Indiana Jones – even though Tom Selleck was originally considered for the role – and that’s just one reason why we should hope this series is never rebooted. Ford was just perfectly cast. Some action movie actors were just made to play the role they got.
The same applies to Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator and Sylvester Stallone in First Blood. It is hard to imagine anyone else in those roles, yet Lance Henriksen was reportedly considered to play the T-800. At the same time, Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood were named as possible options to play Vietnam veteran John Rambo! It should also be remembered that John Wayne, George C. Scott, Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen, and Burt Lancaster were all offered the lead role in Dirty Harry. Today, it seems that Eastwood was really the only choice to carry the Smith & Wesson Model 29 as the SFPD detective.
Those movies remind us that sometimes Hollywood gets its right in choosing action movie actors for a role, yet there has also been no shortage of bad casting in action films in recent years.
Here are a few of the worst examples.
Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher
With his expensive smile, Tom Cruise absolutely is Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun and Top Gun: Maverick, and this serves as a perfect example of a role no one else could possibly take on. Even if Miles Teller takes over the lead in the series, there is only one Maverick.
Likewise, it is hard to imagine anyone else playing Joel Goodsen in Risky Business. At the same time, Cruise has even been OK in the Mission Impossible series – even if the franchise fails to live up to the original T.V. series. Yet, Cruise is also an example of the worst casting in recent memory.
For some reason, in 2011, Cruise was selected to play the title character in Jack Reacher. At the time, Lee Child (aka James Dover Grant), author of the book series, defended the casting decision. Childs further suggested finding suitable action movie actors to play the 6-foot, five-inch military veteran would be nearly impossible.
Childs was proved wrong with the arrival of the Amazon Video series Reacher in 2022. Alan Michael Ritchson is truly the unstoppable force that is Jack Reacher. So, while Cruise can continue to fly as Maverick even into his late 50s, it was a serious reach that he could play Reacher, which he did twice!
John Krasinski as Jack Ryan
Many actors have successfully played multiple characters. The aforementioned Harrison Ford is an example. He simply is Han Solo and Indiana Jones, but he is also arguably Jack Ryan. Though he was not the first of the action movie actors to play the CIA analyst turned Naval Academy professor turned analyst and then CIA deputy director – as that would go to Alec Baldwin – Ford managed to bring that not-quite-an-action hero vibe to the character in two Tom Clancy adaptations, Patriot Games and A Clear and Present Danger. As Ryan eventually becomes president in the book series, Air Force One could be seen as the de facto third part of a Harrison-led Clancy trilogy.
All that is worth stating is that, to paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bentsen, I read Jack Ryan’s books and felt Jack Ryan was a friend – and Mr. Krasinski, you’re no Jack Ryan.
It is true that Chris Pratt successfully transitioned from a goofball in T.V.’s Parks & Recreation to star as a U.S. Navy SEAL in Zero Dark Thirty and is now a bona fide action star. But Krasinski tried to chart a similar course, jumping from The Office to Thirteen Hours and then being cast as the title character in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. He failed on all counts.
Maybe it could have worked, but the problem was that the series used some – not all – of the characters (really just their names) while reinventing everything else. Instead of having one season based on a particular book in the series or shifting the action to the current Jack Ryan Jr. stories, we were treated to “original” and ridiculous plots that lacked the world-building so crucial in Clancy’s works. We never really got a chance to see Ryan as an overconfident analyst turned professor because Krasinski was cast as an action hero instead. The actor is believable as a paper salesman, but he’s never convincing as a geo-political analyst, and he’s absolutely not a Special Forces operative.
Ben Affleck and Chris Pine as Jack Ryan
Everything just stated about Krasinski remains true with Ben Affleck and Chris Pine, who were each cast as a younger Jack Ryan. The thinking was probably that Harrison Ford was too old to run around in Sum of All Fears, while most of the action is passed on to John Clark and Domingo “Ding” Chavez in the novel. Thus, Ryan was demoted from his post so that his role in the film could be increased.
It didn’t work on so many levels.
Affleck has proven to be a reasonable action star in films such as The Town and The Accountant, and he wasn’t so much miscast as Jack Ryan as the character was just badly reinvented. Affleck is at the right age now. Someone should look to reboot the novels and stay faithful to them, but that’s not likely to happen.
The same problems with Affleck also hold true of Pine in the one-and-done Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which attempted to create a Jason Bourne style of young Jack Ryan adventures. Pine has gone on to be a reasonable young Captain James T. Kirk—although he’s also not so young anymore.
Michael B. Jordan as John Clark
Talking about Tom Clancy’s John Clark, Michael B. Jordan was a true example of bad casting in the Amazon original Without Remorse, which attempted to serve as the origin story for John Kelly, a U.S. Navy SEAL who becomes John Clark. The issue is one of timing. Clark is supposed to be a Vietnam War veteran, but Jordan plays him as a veteran of the Global War on Terror (GWoT).
In theory, that should and could work, as Amazon was able to update Bosch by making Harry Bosch a Gulf War vet rather than a Vietnam veteran.
The problem is that in the Ryanverse novels, Clark’s past is a mystery that is only slowly revealed, where Jordan is introduced at the moment of the tragedy that changes his life, removing the character’s mystique in the process. It isn’t helped that the streaming service’s take on Without Remorse is just dumb from beginning to end.
Perhaps a better story could have saved Clark, but Jordan still doesn’t come off as an intelligence officer with years of experience. He was very good as Adonis Creed in the Rocky Balboa spinoff series and has proven to be suited to the Marvel superhero series.
Kevin Costner as Robin Hood
Kevin Costner has been good at playing cowboys, and while his take on Wyatt Earp failed to be as compelling as Kurt Russell in Tombstone, Costner has also successfully played lawmen, lawyers, bodyguards, outlaws, and family men. He was even decent in duds like Waterworld and The Postman.
However, Costner was arguably the worst thing in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, although some critics suggested the walk from the White Cliffs of Dover to Nottingham via Hadrian’s Wall, a distance of 560 miles, doesn’t help in the least. The early 1990s take on Robin Hood was an update that we didn’t need, and its execution was truly flawed.
Costner only made a bad film worse.
Interestingly, director Kevin Reynolds wanted Costner for the part, while the actor had turned the role down until hearing Reynolds was directing. That proved to be a mistake. The pair argued over the tone of the film, as Costner reportedly pushed for more Indiana Jones-style action, like the opening sequence in Jerusalem, while Reynolds wanted a more story-driven film. The director also wisely didn’t want Costner to attempt an English accent, but in the end, Costner was criticized for sounding more L.A. than U.K.
George Clooney in The Peacemaker
Fresh off a T.V. career began with the final seasons of The Facts of Life and then the early seasons of Roseanne; before breaking out with ER, George Clooney was cast in the action-thriller The Peacemaker with Nicole Kidman. While the story of stolen Russian nuclear weapons was reasonably compelling, Clooney is never convincing as a former U.S. Army Ranger turned military intelligence officer.
With its James Bond-like plot, the film needed action movie actors who could be deadly without being a deadly series. Instead, Clooney was unnecessarily smug rather than suave and lacked the focus one might expect from a Special Forces professional. While Clooney would also misfire with Batman & Robin, he did hit his mark with Three Kings and then as Danny Ocean in Ocean’s 11 and its two sequels.
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