The one actor responsible for Harrison Ford’s worst movie: “A big part of the draw”
Much like we normal folk have wishlists, things we’d enjoy ticking off doing, like maybe having a nice holiday in Portugal or buying that big telly that looks like a picture frame, or not getting whatever Covid is these days. And ultra-successful actors do too, it’s just their ones are more along the lines of ‘Oh, I fancy working with Gary Oldman at some point’. At least if you’re Harrison Ford, that is.
Of course, only one person can be Harrison Ford, if you exclude celebrity lookalikes, but luckily for him, he has managed to strike a line through that particular bucket list item not once but twice, albeit with varying degrees of success.
Now if you’re a knowledgeable film buff, which of course you are, you’ll no doubt be aware that the first time these two behemoths of acting linked up was for the classic 1990s thriller Air Force One, with Ford playing the US President James Marshall and Oldman in fully unhinged mode as the Russian terrorist Ivan Korshunov, both of them stuck on the most famous Jumbo jet in the world.
It is everything you would expect from a 1997 action movie: Wolfgang Petersen directing, plenty of one-liners, lots of post-Cold War paranoia (more of that later), and bad guys getting blown backwards off their feet. Oh, and a good helping of Independence Day-style ‘we’re the best goddamn country on earth goddamit’ patriotism to boot.
Ford and Oldman were a fine pairing, and the on-screen chemistry plus all of the above proved predictably successful, Air Force One bringing in some $315million at the box office and picking up two Oscar nominations. You might think, then, that repeating the trick, to some extent, would also result in a fine film, but as the makers of 2013’s Paranoia discovered, it doesn’t matter what lovely ingredients you put in a pie if you then burn it to a cinder in the oven.
A thriller starring the less famous Hemsworth brother, Liam, and high-profile actor Amber Heard, it was a book adaptation that, even going by the poster, should never have cost what it did to make, which was about $35m, most of which probably went on actor salaries. The storyline is some kind of techno-hacker-FBI nonsense that you don’t need to concern yourself with; suffice to say, it has a current Rotten Tomatoes score of a whacking 8% and ranks as Ford’s worst ever film.
But none of that, or the salary presumably, put Ford off the chance to work opposite Oldman again, with Ford explaining to Collider at the time: “When I knew that he was attached to this film, it was a big part of the draw”.
Adding, “I had enjoyed very much working with him in Air Force One, and I was looking forward to the opportunity to work with him again. He’s fun. You never know what he’s going to do and what he’s going to look like or who he’s going to be.”
This is certainly the case where Oldman is concerned; the British actor proving to be one of the most chameleonic performers the UK has ever produced over the last forty years, effortlessly going from Dracula to Churchill to wispy-bearded wizard to Gotham City commissioner without as much as a stumble.
Ford, meanwhile, continues to twinkle in his twilight, winning a raft of award nominations for his work on the Apple TV therapy show Shrinking and starring in two seasons of the Taylor Sheridan western creation 1923 alongside Helen Mirren.
