The Best and Worst of Jamie Foxx

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 "Sleepless" star Jamie Foxx.

Films starring Jamie Foxx that I've seen:
Held Up
Any Given Sunday
Ray
Stealth
Jarhead
The Kingdom
Law Abiding Citizen
Due Date 
Rio
Horrible Bosses
Django Unchained
White House Down
The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Horrible Bosses 2

Best Performance: Ray (2004)
It's a safe choice going with the role that netted Foxx an Oscar, but Ray is far and away his best work as an actor. Foxx's turn as blues legend Ray Charles in this underrated biopic is one of the most astonishing performances I've ever seen. This is the type of fearless, well-rounded and authentic-feeling performance that every actor should strive for when they're tasked with playing a real person. 

Worst Performance: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)
Like a lot of things in both Amazing Spider-Man films, I have no idea how the hell this managed to go so wrong. Foxx seemed like a great choice to play a villain in a superhero film, but his turn as Electro was basically just two hours of shameless overacting and yelling bad lightning puns at Spider-Man. Sad!

Best Film: Django Unchained (2012):
While I am a hardcore Quentin Tarantino fanboy, Django Unchained was the first movie of his since Kill Bill Vo1.1 that I was truly in awe of. The acting from Christoph Waltz, Samuel L. Jackson, Walton Goggins, Leonardo DiCaprio and Don Johnson is fantastic, the pacing is incredibly brisk for a film that is nearly 3 hours long and above all, it manages to work as both a darkly comedic revenge tale and a no-holds-barred look at the atrocities of slavery full without ever coming across as disjointed or disrespectful. 

Worst Film: Any Given Sunday (1999) 
My affinity for sports films is well-documented on this site. To get a feel for how of a sucker I am for the subgenre, I non-ironically count long-forgotten films like Draft Day, Coach Carter and Gridiron Gang among my all-time favorites. One of the very small number of sports dramas that failed to meet my incredibly low standards was Any Given Sunday. Oliver Stone somehow managed to make a movie centered around football-which is my favorite sport by a pretty significant margin-starring Al Pacino in full Tony Montana-yelling mode boring as shit. If it wasn't for Pacino's constant yelling and Foxx's thoroughly believable turn as arrogant quarterback Willie Beamen, I would've fallen asleep an hour in. Everything from the feel of the football scenes to the way that locker room atmosphere is depicted feels disingenuous and the acting aside from the aforementioned parties is god awful (Dennis Quaid, Cameron Diaz and LL Cool J are particularly bad). Of the small portion of Stone's filmography that I've seen, this is easily the biggest misfire.          

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 "Split" star James McAvoy .