Rami Malek Ranked

Welcome to "Ranked", a weekly series where I rank a franchise or filmography from worst to best and hand out assorted related superlatives. This week, I'm profiling the work of Rami Malek-whose latest project "The Amateur" is now playing in theaters.  

Rami Malek's Filmography Ranked:

12.Battleship (D)

11.Larry Crowne (C)

10.Oldboy (C)

9.The Master (C)

8.Night at the Museum (B-)

7.Bohemian Rhapsody (B-)

6.Amsterdam (B-)

5.The Little Things (B)

4.Oppenheimer (B)

3.Need for Speed (B)

2.No Time to Die (B+)

1.Short Term 12 (A)

Top Dog: Short Term 12 (2013)

Destin Daniel Cretton, Brie Larson, Kaitlyn Dever and LaKeith Stanfield all announced themselves as major talents with this powerful tiny indie drama about the young leader (Larson) of a facility that provides short term housing for teenagers working their way through the foster care system whose immediate strong bond with a new resident (Dever) reopens old wounds from her past. Cretton does an incredible job of crafting a raw human story that doesn't pull any punches, and Larson gives an astounding performance as a woman who believed she had moved past the trauma of her abusive childhood until she meets someone whose experiences mirrored her own at that age. As unlikely as it is given where their careers are at right now, I'd love to see Cretton and Larson-who've gone on to become frequent collaborators-eventually work their way back to making movies like Short Term 12.      

Bottom Feeder: Battleship (2012)

Peter Berg has made some fun movies (Friday Night Lights! The Rundown! Spenser Confidential!) in his career. Battleship is not among them. Battle: Los Angeles-which came out a year prior-may've been a deeply corny, idiotic military vs aliens movie, but at least it had stretches where it was fun to watch. This shit is just a complete joyless slog for about 98% of its running time (there's a sequence in the climax where a group of old Navy vets spring into action to defeat alien aircraft with a decommissioned WWII-era ship since the aliens can't track or interfere with the old ship's analog radar and weapons system that is a hoot) as it takes itself way too seriously for a sci-fi action blockbuster that's based on a fucking board game. While I understand that everybody in Hollywood at the time wanted their own answer to Transformers, I'm absolutely dumbfounded that there were executives at Universal that thought this strangely stoic take on Battleship was going to be a huge hit.               

Most Underrated: Need for Speed (2014)

Is Need for Speed a riff on the early Fast and Furious movies? No doubt. Does that prevent it from absolutely kicking ass? Fuck no. There's a real 2000's nu metal-and-Mountain Dew vibe present in the race sequences (which are full of sick practical car stunts!) and scenery-chewing performances from Luke Evans as a disgraced former Indy Car driver turned illegal street racing phenom who doesn't play by the rules, Kid Cudi as the eccentric helicopter-flying best friend of Aaron Paul's Dom Toretto-lite protagonist and Michael Keaton as the reclusive emcee of the Daytona 500 of illegal street races that is just beautiful to behold. It's easily one of the most slept-on pieces of trashy blockbuster filmmaking from the 2010's and I wish they had gotten the chance to make six more of them. 

Most Overrated: The Master (2012)

Every time I sit down to watch a Paul Thomas Anderson movie; I maintain a glimmer of hope that this will be the one that sells me on one of the most beloved auteurs of the past 30 years.  As of this writing, Licorice Pizza was the only instance where that happened. The Master-which is the work of Anderson's that I've seen most recently-is actually far and away the least impressed I've been with an Anderson joint yet. As terrific as Joaquin Phoenix and Philip Seymour Hoffman are here, I just wasn't at all compelled by the cult leader/cult member dynamic that drives this story of a troubled WWII veteran battling PTSD (Phoenix) who feels he may finally found salvation in the form of a traveling philosopher/religious leader (Hoffman) who claims to have the answers to all of life's ills. Nothing it says about how people fall into cults, cult leaders who prey on their members, etc. is at all thought-provoking, the pacing is even more sluggish than usual for PTA film and quite frankly, I never believed that Phoenix's character was buying what Seymour Hoffman's was selling.