The favourite movie of Mark Wahlberg’s career: “It just works on every level”
The career of Mark Wahlberg has been a very curious thing, with the star regularly showing flashes of dramatic brilliance and expert comic timing, but more often than not deciding that staggeringly mediocre action thrillers are the best use of his time.
Not to sound overly cynical about it, but there’s a possibility the movies that require him to wield firearms and mow down bad guys are a lot easier to get made and pay substantially more than intimate dramas or long-gestating passion projects, which helps explain why he’s become the go-to guy for distinctly B-tier genre fare.
When he puts his best into a performance, then the results turn out along the lines of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights, Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, and David O. Russell’s The Fighter, the latter two of which earned him on and off-camera Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ and ‘Best Picture’ respectively.
On the other side of the coin, there’s the Wahlberg who finds himself all too happy to maintain that blank furrow-browed expression in a constant stream of subpar shoot ’em ups like Max Payne, Contraband, Shooter, Mile 22, Spenser Confidential, and Infinite. He’s become very famous and exceedingly wealthy as a result, but pigeonholing himself as an action hero is typically when he’s at his worst.
There have of course been several outliers along the way, with Peter Berg regularly bringing out the best of both worlds by having Wahlberg do his stoic thing in accomplished dramatically-inclined movies that balance tension with escapism, but when the time came for the star to name the best film he’d ever appeared in, he might be the only person to have called it the best film he’d ever appeared in.
Of course, taste is entirely subjective, but considering 2002’s mystery caper The Truth About Charlie earned a shade over $7million at the box office on a budget of $60 million and was forgotten from almost the second it hit cinemas, it’s reasonable to say there’s not many folks out there who’d rank it among Marky Mark’s top tier.
A remake of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn’s Charade with shades of François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, those are three names that don’t usually exist in Wahlberg’s orbit, and it’s easy to see why. Still, The Truth About Charlie was celebrated as Wahlberg’s favourite of his own flicks in an interview with the BBC at the time of its release, in part because “it just works on every level.”
“It’s character-driven and there’s no computer-generated effects in this movie,” he explained. “It’s back to basics, but it works as a whole, and has the best stunt sequences and action sequences I’ve ever seen.” As anyone that’s seen The Truth About Charlie can attest, though, he’s talking utter bobbins, but at least he had a good time making it.
