The Best and Worst of Bradley Cooper

The "Best and Worst" series profiles the best and worst work of an actor starring in one of the week's new theatrical releases. This week I take a look at the filmography of "Burnt" star Bradley Cooper.

Film starring Bradley Cooper that I've seen:
Wet Hot American Summer
Wedding Crashers
The Rocker
Yes Man
The Hangover
The A-Team
Limitless
The Hangover Part II
Hit and Run
The Words
Silver Linings Playbook 
The Place Beyond the Pines
The Hangover Part III
American Hustle 
Guardians of the Galaxy
American Sniper
Aloha

Best Performance: Silver Linings Playbook (2012)
Like most of the moviegoing public, this was the first time I began to take Cooper seriously as an actor.  Cooper's turn as Pat Solitano, a bipolar man trying to get his life back together after a violent episode in which he beat up the man his wife was having an affair with, is one of the most sensitive, emotionally-deep and spellbinding performances I've ever seen. This performance was critical in Cooper's transformation from the guy who stars in nothing but third-tier romantic comedies to one of the finest dramatic actors working today and I firmly believe that if Daniel "All I Do is Win Oscars" Day-Lewis wasn't nominated, he would've taken home Best Actor in 2012.

Worst Performance: Hit and Run (2012)
Cooper took this role as a favor to his good friend Dax Shepard, who wrote and directed this film. In hindsight, he should've done audiences a favor and passed on the role. Cooper overacts the shit out of his role as the film's antagonist, Alex Dimitri, a professional bank robber looking to seek revenge on his onetime getaway driver (Shepard) who testified against him in court and sent him to prison years earlier. Armed with fake dreadlocks and a pair of sweet sunglasses, Cooper tarnishes the quality of an otherwise solid movie with his obnoxiously over-the-top performance.
 
Best Film: Wet Hot American Summer (2001)
As someone who loves absurdist comedies, it doesn't get much better than Wet Hot American Summer. Armed with a fantastic ensemble of then mostly-unknown actors including Cooper, Elizabeth Banks, Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler, Wet Hot American Summer unleashes an onslaught of quirky characters and out-of-left-field humor to create a consistently hilarious film that's unlike anything I've seen before. The thing that strikes me the most about this film is how much better it gets on repeat viewings. The jokes are thrown out at such a rapid pace that it takes multiple viewings to absorb all of them and once you do, the film goes from great to all-time great.

Worst Film: Aloha (2015)
Aloha is one of those movies where you'll be left scratching your head at how so many talented people were able to make a film that's this horrible. Despite boasting a great director Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire) and an ensemble cast featuring top-flight actors in Cooper, Emma Stone, Bill Murray, Rachel McAdams and Alec Baldwin, Aloha still manages to be a catastrophic failure. The film is remarkably corny, the tone is all over the place, the story is absolutely absurd and everyone besides Baldwin gives uncharacteristically lifeless performances. Aloha is easily the worst thing anyone attached to this film has ever been involved in and is bound to live in infamy as one of the biggest wastes of talent in the history of cinema.

 Thank you for reading this week's installment of "The Best and Worst of". Next week, I'll take a look at the best and worst work of "Trumbo" star John Goodman.