Brad Pitt: 5 Awesome Performances and 5 That Sucked

The 5 That Sucked

5. Ocean's Twelve

When you look at it, Brad Pitt is a perfect fit for the Ocean€™s franchise. He€™s glamorous, impossibly good looking, capable of portraying a sense of slick purpose and easy charm. Plus, he looks ridiculously awesome in a suit. But much like the franchise itself, Pitt''s performances as Rusty Ryan can be described as a series of peaks and troughs. Ocean€™s Eleven was excellent, positively dripping with that old Vegas glamour and possessing a plot that was extremely tight, given the amount of actors the screenwriters had to accommodate for. Pitt was probably on stand-by mode; all he had to do was stand there, look pretty and emanate endless cool. Pitt could do this in his sleep, and given the added boost of standing next to George Clooney, it becomes even easier than that. However, come the time of the second film, the audience had a revelation; there's a fine line between cool and smug, and these fellows had just crossed it. It was cool to have an extensive, complex plan to rob a ruthless Casino mogul, and to have this plan succeed. It's smug to throw all this complex planning out the window and effectively have the entire film amount to a simple bag-swap on a continental train, then ask your audience to marvel at just how brilliant this slight of hand was. But we didn't marvel. We were pissed. Arguably, as one of the main leads, it's Pitt's character that suffers most from this deception. Whilst one could make a case to blame Clooney's Danny Ocean, Danny is still the heart of the film, has obvious depth and has shown himself to be quite charming over a collection of scenes with his wife Tess (who looks like Julia Roberts, y'know). Yet Rusty is played as the epitome of cool. Whilst he is routinely given the run-around by Catherine Zeta-Jones' character, this does his reputation no harm- it merely enhances hers by showing that she can outsmart even Rusty, a man so slick he can get away with eating in every scene, without breaking his charming, debonair aura. Yet Pitt's portrayal of this impossibly cool character has an obvious weakness. He's utterly one dimensional- Rusty is completely defined by how cool he is, and granted, when put in the correct situation, he can be very cool indeed. Yet in the wrong situation, this coolness evaporates faster than the audience goodwill come Twelve's credit sequence, and this leads to a problem- when we knock away this defining feature (like the events of Twelve did), we're left with a non-entity of a character. When the wry canniness of Eleven morphed instead into blatant smart-assery, you really have no reason left at all to root for Rusty. This problem is caused by Pitt's performance; it really is quite vacuous, entirely because this type of role isn't really a challenge for him. When you're already a glamorous, good-looking man, playing a glamorous, good-looking character is hardly a stretch. It certainly wasn't in Eleven, but he got away with it then. This time around, Pitt is so blatantly on autopilot that there's a discreet air of complacency- whether intentional or not- that defines the performance. There's just no effort made beyond the assumption that the character will be cool no matter his actions, and when this assumption falls flat on in it's face, Rusty Ryan is left without a dramatic leg to stand on, and that's entirely Pitt's fault. But if the role is such a non-entity, why have I given it such condemnation? That's simple. The problem is that Pitt is ostensibly playing up to his own stereotype with this role; that he's a good looking man first, an actor second. Whilst the entire Rusty role is hardly the most challenging fare for any actor, Pitt's playing of the character opens up these old criticisms of him, obscuring the fact that deep down he is a decent actor, when he stays away from easy tripe like this.