Earlier this month, the Internet went wild with anticipation when the trailer for Gladiator II The film seems to have it all: legendary director Ridley Scott, a historical spectacle assisted by computer-generated graphics (including a flooded Colosseum!), a hot young star (Paul Mescal), and familiar, beloved faces like Denzel Washington and Pedro Pascal. The one thing that seems to be missing? Russell Crowe, whose signature role as Maximus is much-mentioned and shown in archival footage, but is presumably not an on-screen character in the film. A big reason, of course, is that Maximus died at the end of the film. Gladiator – though that didn’t stop a previous sequel from suggesting a story following the character into the afterlife, reflecting how vitally important Crowe’s involvement seemed in the past. Now, shifting to an even older Denzel as the film’s biggest draw makes sense. Crowe has admitted to feeling a bit of jealousy that he won’t be able to work on it. But he’s keeping busy at Netflix, currently starring Land of evila movie you may not have heard of until it made its debut on Netflix and reached number one on the Netflix Top 10.
Land of evil It’s not a Netflix movie. Neither are they Sleeping dogs either Exorcismthe other two films starring Crowe from 2024. (So far, he has a supporting role in Kraven the hunter(And at least one other Crowe project could still hit the screen in 2024.) Because none of these three films had a high-profile theatrical release, it would be easy enough to assume that Crowe had followed the path of other male stars of a certain age — such as John Travolta, a post-breakdown Mel Gibson, a pre-retirement Bruce Willis, or a pre-comeback Nicolas Cage — making low-budget thrillers that pay a decent salary, albeit with vastly diminished prestige.
To some extent, this has happened with Crowe. Sleeping dogs It’s particularly cheesy Memory imitation, and Exorcism starts off with a big meta-terrorist hook but fails to land. Last year The Pope’s exorcist —another film that spent some time atop the Netflix Top 10—probably won’t appear on any list of Crowe’s top ten performances, nor will Land of evilThe last time he gave a really good performance in a really good movie was probably The good boysalmost a decade ago.
Yet there is something more comfortable and likeable about Crowe than his superficially similar brothers in the film world, such as Gibson or his younger equivalent, Gerard Butler. Like those guys, Crowe has a certain willingness to take on basic genre work like Land of evilwhere he plays an Air Force drone pilot who tries to help a soldier (Liam Hemsworth) reach an extraction point in the Philippines, allowing Crowe to play a tough military man and spend at least part of the film sitting in what looks like a relatively comfortable chair. But to the kind of role that could easily be set up to be shot in a couple of days and consist mostly of growling at superiors and beating up bad guys from a distance, Crowe brings a surprising warmth, even when he’s smashing his facility’s TV to get his colleagues’ attention.
In one sequence, after finishing his shift, Crowe’s character heads to the grocery store, where he chats with his pregnant wife and eventually gets an urgent call from his soldier. It’s easy to imagine Gibson handling these scenes with a lot more bitterness, leaning more heavily on comedy by rolling his eyes at his wife’s requests, and it’s equally easy to imagine Butler doing something similar, trying to wring some laughs out of his harsh frustration. There’s something gentler about Crowe’s version, a kind of wrinkled domesticity that doubles as genuine characterization, adding some nuance to what we already know about his character. (This is not, we’re told, his first marriage.) At the same time, he knows how to get into the urgency when he realizes that the soldier he was talking to during the mission is in danger.
It is a factor that makes the difference: a big part of what makes the potentially (and sometimes actively) chauvinistic Land of evil It seems a bit more like something created by humans. Crowe brings a similar understated charm to his role in The Pope’s exorcistelevating the trashy genre enough to make it feel like an actual movie, rather than straight-to-streaming content. In this later period, Crowe has achieved a rare synthesis of movie star and character actor: he still has the presence that made him a star, plus decades of recognizability, but in his older, less svelte form, he also has some of the properties of a That Guy supporting actor who always brightens the mood in any given scene.
Occasionally, Crowe delves into more genuinely character-driven roles—he’s done supporting work in both DC and Marvel films—which lends an added gravitas. Iron Man and nonsense for Thor: Love and Thunderwhere he plays Zeus. It’s fun to see him in these kinds of projects, which does justice to his wonderfully over-the-top Jekyll/Hyde performance in the ill-fated 2017 film. Mummy! – but it’s also reassuring to know that he can do more realistic work without resorting to absolute trash. Crowe has sometimes seemed uncomfortable with the expectations of Hollywood stardom, but he hasn’t panicked into a streaming deal, perhaps because the idea of being more of an everyday star presence doesn’t seem to frighten him. Maybe he still seems like a movie star because, more than ever, he seems to actually like making movies.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer based in Brooklyn. He is a regular contributor to The AV Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts on www.sportsalcohol.comalso.
