The most underrated movie of Ron Howard’s career: “It’s kind of a pet of mine”
Having directed almost 30 features over the course of nearly 50 years, Ron Howard should have known that the passage of time would cause several of his movies to fall through the cultural cracks.
Not all of them, though, but for every Apollo 13 or How the Grinch Stole Christmas that endures in one way or another, whether it’s simply being a really good film or becoming part of the annual rewatch calendar, there’s an EDtv or The Dilemma that few people give a shit about anymore, if they even did in the first place.
That’s an overarching theme of Howard’s filmography, though; sure, he’s won two Academy Awards, his filmography has earned billions of dollars, and he’s been consistently working for half a century, but what separates him from the truly top-level directors is the lack of any timeless, iconic, or unforgettable masterpieces in his back catalogue.
He’s made a few great movies, but look at the names above him in history’s highest grossers; James Cameron has Avatar and his two Terminator flicks, Peter Jackson has The Lord of the Rings, Steven Spielberg has too many to choose from, Christopher Nolan has The Dark Knight, Robert Zemeckis has Back to the Future and Forrest Gump, and on it goes.
Apollo 13 is probably his finest hour behind the camera, and many of his other credits are entertaining and enjoyable, but Howard has never crossed that final hurdle. He hasn’t created anything that’s a genuine cultural artifact, one that continues to win over new audiences of each generation, and has cemented itself in the history books as a seismic, transformative, or indelible work of cinema.
As a result, Howard’s lesser offerings have a habit of fading from memory pretty quickly. The fact that Inferno made half a billion dollars less than The Da Vinci Code shows that it can happen in the space of a franchise, and when was the last time anyone fired up Far and Away, Thirteen Lives, or Night Shift because they felt like they hadn’t seen it in a while and needed to remedy that problem as soon as possible?
With that in mind, if there’s such a thing as Ron Howard’s single most underrated movie, then Ron Howard knows what it is, and it’s 1986’s Gung-Ho: “I had so much fun making it that it’s kind of a pet of mine,” he shared. “It was so-so at the box office, and it was taken to task because it was made right at the height of the American fear of Japan.”
He’s right on both counts: the comedy, starring Michael Keaton as a former auto plant foreman who tries to negotiate a merger between a Japanese conglomerate acquiring a Pennsylvanian company, was a very modest hit, and it faced criticism from certain quarters for relying on cultural stereotypes to perpetuate American anxieties about the country’s rapid rise to global superpower status.
Gung-Ho isn’t one of Howard’s best, and it might actually be one of his worst, but if anyone said that to his face, then he’d clearly disagree.
