Ron Howard’s best movie of the 21st century, according to Ron Howard: “I’m really proud of that”
The best way to describe the 21st-century version of Ron Howard is consistently inconsistent, and it’s got nothing to do with an uptick in productivity, since he’s maintained a steady pace behind the camera.
In the first 22 years of his filmmaking career, from Grand Theft Auto to EdTV, he helmed 13 features. In the next 22 years, from How the Grinch Stole Christmas to Thirteen Lives, he helmed another 14, and it’s almost classic Ron Howard to have spent almost half a century in the same stride.
However, there’s been a growing disparity between quantity and quality. Those first two decades yielded Splash, Cocoon, Parenthood, Willow, Backdraft, The Paper, Apollo 13, and Ransom, all of which at least ranged from decent to great, and even the lesser ones, like his orgy-tastic fantasy, were still hits.
Since the turn of the 21st century, how many genuinely good movies has he made? How the Grinch Stole Christmas might be stretching it, but the festive caper is undeniably popular, and then there’s A Beautiful Mind, Frost/Nixon, maybe Rush, and possibly The Missing, but that one’s entirely up for debate.
Instead, there’s been a Da Vinci Code trilogy, a JD Vance biopic, a pointless Star Wars spinoff, a comedy so bad it swore Howard off the genre forever, a couple of sizeable box office bombs, and not much else. He might be a two-time Academy Award winner and one of the industry’s most beloved veterans, but the man desperately needs a hit to get him back on the right track.
Having said that, one post-2000 Howard flick has been intentionally omitted, not that it was the hit his creaking filmography has been crying out for, mostly because the studio stabbed him in the back, pulled it from cinemas, and sent it directly to streaming instead, a situation that pissed a lot of people off.
“I think Apollo 13 and Parenthood are probably two of my favourites from that mid-30s, early-40s, what is really, really hitting my stride, when I was feeling confident, and I had the support of the studio and the industry, and those are in their own way movies I’m really proud of and very personal,” he reflected.
That’s no surprise, since he’s always considered Apollo 13 his magnum opus, which it is, while Parenthood was the first of his films that he had a deep emotional investment and connection with. As for the modern era? “In recent years, I would put Thirteen Lives in,” Howard added. “I’m really proud of that movie.”
Go fuck yourself, A Beautiful Mind, even though you won him two Oscars. Feel free to disagree, but he’s probably right. As a work of cinema, bias toward Jim Carrey’s Grinch aside, Thirteen Lives feels more accomplished, dramatically engaging, and diligently crafted than anything else he’s made this century, even if Amazon did it a disservice by dropping it on the streamer with the worst user interface.
