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Absolon
Christopher Lambert. Now here is an actor who absolutely puzzles me with the bizarre direction his career has taken. When the man is good, he dishes out performances that could give Bobby Duvall a run for his money. When he's bad, he is often unwatchably so. Curiously, it seems that great and terrible are Lambert's only categories in terms of both his performances and his films, and the contrast between them are so immense that it's absolutely mind-boggling. Today, Lambert is mainly associated with his most famous (and arguably best) role, Highlander, and the many low-budget sci-fi/action films that he subsequently made over the following years, some of them effective in their own, B-movie sort of way (Mean Guns, Mortal Kombat), and some of them unspeakably awful (Beowulf, Adrenalin: Feel the Rush). Believe it or not, there was a time very early in Lambert’s career when I watched his performances and was positive that he was the next Marlon Brando or Jean Gabin. Lambert has an absolute charm and charisma. It emits from his ability to effectively project emotions and characterizations through the smallest and subtlest movements possible. His eyebrow will twitch or his fingers will tremble, and we know exactly what his character is thinking and why. His acting style is similar to Clint Eastwood’s in that way, only it is more complex because Lambert does not have Eastwood’s overtly intimidating presence, and he must therefore work harder to be as effective and memorable in his method of acting. At the beginning of Lambert’s career, his subtle acting style promised to take him a long way. His breakthrough performance as the shy but intense title role in Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) was, bluntly, one of the greatest performances of the 1980s. The following year, he followed suite with another brilliant performance Luc Besson’s Subway, in which he played a French variation of the James Dean rebel. The performance earned him a César Award (the French Oscar) for best actor, and his success in the film business seemed certain. In 1986, he played the immortal Connor MacLeod in Russell Mulcahy’s Highlander, which went on to become a genre-classic that spawned a franchise. Lambert’s interpretation of an immortal warrior with a tragic past created a character of Shakespearian proportions, and the role left him with a cult following the likes of which he has never been able to live down. MacLeod was certainly his most famous role, but in a way, it was also his most crippling. After Highlander, Lambert became typecast and seemed doomed to play brooding action heroes, as he did poorly in Michael Cimino’s ill-fated The Sicilian (1987). Up to this point in Lambert’s career, his directors were comfortable with letting Lambert use his style of acting to create memorable characters. Cimino tried to force an over-the-top performance out of him that went against his acting style, and the result was a laughable, stone-faced performance in an equally wooden movie. Lambert scrambled to recover from the film and delivered another memorable character in To Kill a Priest (1989), but his subtly was upstaged by a powerhouse performance from Ed Harris, and both the movie and Lambert’s role flew under the radar. In the 1990s, his career looked as if it had found its footing again, but Lambert quickly found himself facing some career missteps and bad luck. He was set to star alongside Marlon Brando and Paul Scofield in David Lean’s adaptation of Joseph Condrad’s Nostromo, but the production grinded to a halt when Lean died suddenly. After that, any hope that Lambert had of establishing himself as a serious actor soon faded with the release of Highlander II: The Quickening in 1991, which is widely regarded today as one of the worst movies of all time. Subsequently, Lambert has been cursed with mainly badly-written roles in badly-written, direct-to-video movies, mostly in the science fiction genre under directors who seem to have cast him for his role in Highlander and have no idea how to utilize his raw talent and get an effective performance out of him. As a result, Lambert’s performances have been hit-and-miss, and his movies have almost always been misses. His acting is the type that requires a strong director to cast him in very specific roles, but because of Lambert's poor track record, no director wants to take him very seriously, let alone cast him. Pity, because when I watch Greystoke or To Kill a Priest today, I remain genuinely awestruck by his brilliant performances, and the level of sophistication his career could be at today had he selected his roles more carefully. Every so often, Lambert will still have a role that reminds me why he is one of my favorites. Smaller, independent films like Resurrection, Gideon, and The Target feature a strong Lambert, under directors who know exactly how to utilize his skill. But just as I’m getting my hopes up, he’ll turn around and star in another low-budget B-movie in which his acting is completely uninspired, as is every other aspect of the movie surrounding him. It is a dichotomy that baffles me. Even in these bad roles, however, Lambert manages to give off certain charm and add interesting little touches that let me know that he is really trying even if his production is not. One can only hope that a gifted director with a high profile will notice one of these touches one day and recognize Lambert’s subtle skill as an actor, and then cast him in a part that will allow the world to take him seriously again. Are you listening, Martin Scorsese? So, this article has really been a review of Lambert, not his film Absolon. But I’ve more or less reviewed it by discussing Lambert’s typical films these days; Absolon is just another low-budget sci-fi film with an uninspired script and a director who doesn’t have a clue how to direct Lambert or, for that matter, any of the other cast members. Perhaps Lambert is comfortable in his niche as the Clint Eastwood of the B-level action movie, but there are clues that he has higher aspirations: Watch Absolon carefully, and notice the way that his otherwise lifeless character stuffs his face with food in amusement while the other actors try to take the ridiculous script seriously. There’s a talented actor somewhere in there trying to crack out of his typecast, and I honestly hope that it happens soon. In the meantime, Absolon doesn’t help his career growth. Cast: A Hannibal Pictures production. Directed by David Barto. Written by Brad Mirman. Rated R for violence and brief language and sexuality. Running time: 90 minutes. Original United States DVD release date: December 16, 2003. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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