There’s something different about Will Smith – or maybe us

ANDEven beyond the brilliant inner quality that characterizes a true movie star, actors are paid to play characters, not just polished, polished versions of themselves. When we talk about “likable” actors, we are responding to the actor’s ability to translate certain qualities on screen. Our job as spectators is to be aware of their expressiveness, the beauty of their features, whether classic or quirky, the way they behave, slouch or dance. We have the freedom to love creation without having to wrestle with the human complexities of its creator.

But what happens when we learn too much about what an actor is? really as? And why, despite knowing better, we still feel a little betrayed when we hear, say, Christian Bale berating a cinematographer in a leaked recording, or, worse, learn that Henry Fonda, an actor who gave a human face to civic education? ideals, he had little tenderness left for his own children? Actors are not our friends, but our relationships with them can be more complicated than friendship. What happens when an actor behaves in a way that makes us recoil from the essence of the actor-viewer bond: the mere sight of their face?

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is not Will Smith’s first film since the night of the 2022 Oscars, when he got up from his chair and slapped Chris Rock hard in the face after Rock made a cruel and not particularly funny joke about his wife’s shaved head. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith. Smith has appeared in one other film since then, Antoine Fuqua’s slave drama Emancipation. But Bad Boys: Ride or Die—the fourth entry in a series that began in 1995 Bad Boys, when Smith and his co-star Martin Lawrence were pretty much just kids – it’s not a drama but an action comedy, the kind of film designed to appeal to a wide audience, and as such is Smith’s first major theatrical release since 2022. Smith has always been able to bring a worldwide audience to the big screen. Previous one Bad Boys provision, Bad boys for life, released in January 2020, about two months before the pandemic shut down cinema, it grossed $426 million worldwide. Thanks, at least in part, to this pandemic pause, Bad boys for life ended up being the highest-grossing film of the year.

See more information: Will Smith’s slap was shocking. The debate that followed was not

Yet Drive or die faces not just one box office hurdle, but two: in addition to the fact that moviegoers were slow to return to theaters this spring, Drive or die stars an old certainty that can now be a risk. Not everyone loves Will Smith: I used to hear complaints from people who thought he was extremely ingratiating as an artist, and we shouldn’t totally dismiss the coded idea that a “likable” black artist is just one who doesn’t threaten white audiences. Smith co-starred alongside Matt Damon in The Legend of Bagger Vance, Robert Redford’s nebulously misguided 2000 ode to a time when black people were told their place was to help white people. Still, you can’t fault Smith for his performance in that film, which feels more awkward than self-assured, as if he were trying, against all odds, to maintain some dignity amid the film’s strange lack of self-awareness.

Plus, a misstep or two never stopped Smith. After getting off to a hot start in the 1990s, he became one of the most beloved—and, for the studios, most profitable—actors of the early 2000s. As half of the early ’90s rap duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince – and later, playing a version of himself on the long-running TV show Fresh prince of Bel Air—He was an affable guy, a pretty boy who could get away with anything, but didn’t try to get away with much. Before long, he became that peculiarly cursed commodity known as a bankable star: he may have made his name, and most of his money, in action comedies like Bad Boys It is Men in Black (1997), both followed by multiple sequences. But he also gave excellent, moving performances in films like All (2001), The Pursuit of Happiness (2006), and I’m a legend (2007), and he used to be the best thing in not-so-good movies like I steal (2004). And in 2021 King Richard, he was fantastic as Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena, a proud peacock papa whose stubbornness and drive brought out the best in his daughters, even if it sometimes kept him from being the best father or husband (for Brandy by Aunjanue Ellis, also great). It was a performance with bravado but without vanity; Smith had reached a point in his career where he could walk that balance with ease.

While you don’t have to like Will Smith, it’s not easy to tear yourself away from idea of your sympathy. And it’s possible that, over the years, his easygoing affability on screen set him free, becoming a kind of platform upon which he could build more complex performances. Smith has always leaned toward somewhat conventional and generally uplifting stories in his dramatic roles. But even though he chose, and in some cases produced, old machines like the 2008 Seven pounds (in which he plays a man who tries to atone for a tragic mistake by donating his organs to deserving recipients – ugh), you rarely get the sense that he’s sleepwalking into a role. In The Pursuit of Happiness, Set in the 1980s and based on a true story, he plays a salesman and single father (his son is played by a very young Jaden Smith) who finds himself homeless on his way to building a better life.

This is one of Smith’s greatest performances: if, in some scenes, his character appears like one of those bouncing clowns, leaping back with a smile every time he is knocked down, in others he shows something like silent terror – hiding his anxiety from his son takes something away from him, and it shows. The film, despite what the title might have you believe, never turns into a sentimental fable about surviving hard times with laughter and smiles. It’s a story about how easy it is for a hard-working, responsible person to find themselves on the margins of society. Smith was already a multimillionaire when he won To chase. You could argue that these are the types of roles that rich actors he must are taking it, but not everyone does. If Smith found a wide audience with his action films and comedies, he brought at least some of that audience with him in his more serious roles. And no matter how much money he made, he continued to emit a “It’s still just me!” vibe, like he truly believed, deep down, that he could be the Fresh Prince for all eternity.

He may have succeeded – and he may still succeed. It’s hard to know how much of your audience has gone forever shut down by the slap incidentand how many really don’t care. Drive or die, as Bad boys for life, was directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, the Belgian filmmaking team known as Adil & Bilall. (The first two installments were directed by music video director turned blast maestro Michael Bay.) It’s one of those pictures clearly designed to please fans rather than create any new territory. Smith’s character, Miami detective Mike Lowrey, and his partner, Lawrence’s Marcus Burnett, are called in to clear the name of the duo’s late boss, Joe Pantoliano’s Captain Howard, who was posthumously implicated in some bad cartel stuff. drugs. The film begins with a wedding: Mike is finally settling down. (His fiancee is played by Melanie Liburd.) The plot will force him to rely on his estranged son, incarcerated criminal Armando (Jacob Scipio), introduced in Bad boys for life. At the beginning of the film, Marcus’s poor eating habits get the better of him and he suffers a heart attack, only to feel invincible when he recovers. The banter between him and his longtime partner involves deep subjects, such as mortality, and also ridiculous subjects: Marcus claims that Mike was an ass in another life, and Marcus owned him. He He was the cool one, the smart one, the one who gave orders.

Lawrence looks about your age; he is 59 years old. Smith is 55, but has that soft, timeless look that many of the richest stars buy for themselves, whether through expensive products or more extensive procedures. He looks fine, at least in a generic sense. His comedic timing is more accurate than ever; he boldly takes whatever violent action the film demands of him. He is, it seems, as attractive as ever.

However, there is something different about him, or maybe there is just something different about him. us. Smith looked like a bully when he approached Rock that night and punched him in the jaw. Maybe it was just a case of a somewhat stubborn guy getting caught in a bad mood. This could happen to anyone. But it still revealed a truth about him: that behind the facade of an artist who spent decades earning our faith in his bubbly on-screen persona – as well as delivering persuasive performances that bridged, in the best way, the distance between artist and audience – there is a man desperate to control the vibrations in the air around him.

Even though Smith was ostensibly defending his wife’s honor, he made that moment all about himself. Eventually he apologized, profusely if unconvincingly. Was he just having a bad night or were his actions triggered by a deep malice? We all saw, at least momentarily, something like evil cross his face. We’ll never really know what he was thinking, but seeing it on screen is different now. It’s the actor’s job to enchant us, to enchant us, to make us believe in whatever character he is inventing before our eyes. Now we have a better sense of how much energy Smith has to expend to emit that radiant, seemingly generous light, when it used to be something he just handed to us, like a gift.