A-List: Best Will Smith Roles
By J. Don Birnam
August 11, 2016
3. Hancock (2008)
This is perhaps one of his most underappreciated performances, and as close as you can get to the best role without actually being there.
If you recall, in Hancock Smith plays an alcoholic, depressive superhero who wreaks as much havoc as he prevents. Yeah, he saves people’s lives, but he’s a mess and a train-wreck in the process - he’s rude too, insulting rather than thanking little old ladies like a caped crusader might do.
Fine, so the movie itself is a little silly. Look, if you’ve watched Suicide Squad you know Smith isn’t exactly known for Oscar contenders (pop quiz: has he ever been in a Best Picture nominated movie?). So, we really have to focus on the character.
And what makes his performance in this film so memorable is the sincerity with which Smith portrays the troubled hero, the genuine feeling to his conflicted emotions. It’s arguably one of the few films in which Smith is just happy to embody the character rather than try to overact or show off.
Once more he is paired off with another amazingly talented star (Charlize Theron) and holds his own quite well. Of course it helps that he’s a strange combination of Jason Bourne (Hancock also suffers from amnesia), Superman (he can fly like no other), and Don Birnam (no pun intended) from the Lost Weekend, with his drinking. This permits Smith to again explore several types of performances - serious, emotional, funny, sarcastic, and angry.
I bet he wishes the superhero he just played was even a fraction as interesting as Hancock was.
2. Ali (2001)
Recognized by many as arguably Smith’s best role, and one of the two to net him an Academy Award nomination, there is no doubt that his portrayal of the boxing legend in this eponymous biopic is something to remember.
In the movie, Smith moves through several key stages of Muhammad Ali’s life - this is not just a boxing movie, it’s a movie about the social and political undercurrents that are taking over the United States at the time in which the boxer lived.
The role does require Smith to play both hero and contemplative observer, to be both the boxing fighter and the unwitting participant to history. He’s helped, once more, by another great actor. This time it’s Jon Voight who serves in the role that Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron played in other films on this list, as he portrays the famed sports journalist.
But it is really Smith as Cassius Clay that steals the show - he goes from Vietnam War conscientious objector to political activist to title weight champion. The film thus requires Smith to act in his (to this day) most versatile performance ever, to actually show emotion where normally he’d just portray humor.
He does that in spades and he can proudly say that the successfully ticked off the historical biopic of his bucket list.
1. I Am Legend (2007)
But my favorite Will Smith performance is without any question as the stranded survivor in Manhattan in the post-apocalyptic dystopian tale, I Am Legend.
Some may have been expecting me to list his second Academy Award-nominated role, for the mysterious fellow in The Pursuit of Happyness. But it is not so - rather, it is the performance that immediately followed that is the most memorable (and, by the way, this one in turn was the one right before Hancock - clearly this is when he was hitting his stride as an actor).
The reason is simple and straightforward - to carry an entire movie with almost no other actors is a feat I’ve always admired, from Robert Redford to Tom Hanks and many others who have of late achieved it. In some ways, though, this performance is of a higher degree of difficulty. While Redford is brilliant in All is Lost, for example, he faces mostly mundane and routine tasks, which he faces with a steady aplomb that keeps the actor mostly even-keeled.
Smith, by contrast, is basically in a horror movie. I Am Legend, as you undoubtedly know, tells the story of a U.S. Army virologist who is one of few survivors after an infectious disease exterminates most of humanity. He is trapped in Manhattan with his faithful dog, forced to live in fear of demonic creatures that make their appearance mostly at night.
What follows is a truly bone-chilling combination of horror, action, and suspense that is surely one of the tightest apocalypse movies ever.
On top of it all, Smith has to battle personal demons—his memory of how he became separate from and likely lost his family, his fateful decisions at the hour of truth, and his unending quest to find a cure to end the dreaded disease and somehow save the world.
Sure, perhaps it’s fair to say that many of Smith’s acting tricks are the ability to scream “Oh, st” repeatedly and run away. There is no pretense here that we are talking about Laurence Olivier. But while Smith may not be a mostly serious actor, he’s a seriously funny, action-hero type actor.
And in I Am Legend he gives the combination of those talents—from Fresh Prince, to Ali, all at the same time.
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