Brendan Fraser's 10 Greatest Performances

The marriage of actor Brendan Fraser and the role of Rick O'Connell is the kind of lightning in a bottle that only happens once or twice every decade. It's the kind of left-of-center casting choice that takes what could have been a fairly stock leading man type and turns him into something entirely different. In Fraser's hands, O'Connell is iconic precisely because he isn't the typical leading man.

Fraser pretty much single-handedly hijacks the Universal Monster flick, turning what was on the verge of turning into an utterly forgettable action/horror hybrid ala Resident Evil into a serialized swashbuckling adventure comedy. As recently pointed out in an excellent article over on Collider by Vinnie Mancuso, a huge part of what makes Fraser's performance so endearing is the way he embodied a new kind of everyman in this role, one that set the tone for decades of heroes to come.

Between this, the fact that the film makes excellent use of his physical comedy skills, and the insanely addicting chemistry he has with Rachel Weisz throughout the entire film, Fraser's performance as O'Connell remains utterly wondrous.