In a culture full of celebrities breathlessly competing for our attention, Harrison Ford feels not just like an anachronism but an aberration — the movie star who really, really doesn’t want to be there. This has long been central to his craggy appeal, as he consistently looks miserable doing promotion for his films, even the ones he likes.
When GQ recently profiled him for Blade Runner 2049, the 75-year-old summed up his press-tour strategy thusly: “It’s always better not to talk about [the work], I think. Just f---ing do it. Don’t ’splain it. Especially if you’re getting away with it.” Ford’s disdain for the mechanics of fame is refreshing and also really funny — he might be the most delightfully grumpy public figure outside of Larry David.
That real-guy authenticity has always been a major part of Ford’s story; it’s often mentioned that he worked as a carpenter before establishing a film career. But once he focused on acting, he emphasized the nuts-and-bolts precision of his work, eschewing the flamboyant or the self-regarding in order to portray men whose chief objective was to do their job well. But ranking Ford’s five decades of film stardom also reveals a core truth: He is not an actor with extraordinary range. That’s not a criticism but, rather, an acknowledgment of something elemental about his technique, which is to deliver performances that are simple and true with no fuss. It’s not that he hasn’t pushed himself, but he seems to understand where his strengths lie and doesn’t fret about his limitations. You never watch a Harrison Ford performance thinking he’s trying to impress you. (Let other, less-confident actors worry about such nonsense.)
Below is our rundown of Ford’s 36 biggest roles, skipping over the really early stuff (like Journey to Shiloh), the utterly forgettable cameos (good-bye forever, Jimmy Hollywood), and his minor work in Apocalypse Now. What emerges is a career in which he found superstardom early on, parlayed it into years of being a dependable box-office titan, stumbled after the hits stopped coming, and then returned, triumphant, in long-awaited sequels to his biggest films. We tried our best not to overintellectualize a body of work that’s most striking for its immediacy and lack of self-consciousness. As Ford would say, let’s just f---ing do it.
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36. "The Expendables 3" (2014)
The infamous Expendables 3 poster — which features a truly shocking 16 people on it — had no more uncomfortable (and obviously Photoshopped) participant than Ford, who looks like someone cut out an old Random Hearts publicity shot and spliced it in with the promise that no one would tell Harrison. Ford has just a couple of scenes as a getaway pilot who helps the gang, and he resembles more a Sinatra cameo in an old Bob Hope golf comedy than anything else. Also: Contrary to the chummy nature of these films, there is no way he has ever so much as met Dolph Lundgren.
35. "Hollywood Homicide" (2003)
There are tired, lazy buddy-cop movies — and then there’s throwing Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett (during that brief few months of the Hartnett boom) together as homicide cops in Hollywood and then just calling the movie Hollywood Homicide! Ford is supposed to be growly and grizzled, but he can barely muster up the energy to do that. He also looks openly contemptuous of his co-star. Six years ago earlier he was helping usher Brad Pitt into stardom; here, he does not look amused by the downgrade.
34. "Firewall" (2006)
Ford’s timeless quality, the sense that he could have been a movie star in roughly any decade since the dawn of sound, only works against him when directors try to surround him with the Trend of the Day; Harrison Ford shouldn’t be wasted in techno espionage thrillers, particularly when it’s obvious he doesn’t entirely understand what’s happening in them. Here, he’s a normal dad who is targeted by identity thieves, namely Paul Bettany’s nasty hacker. While it’s briefly funny to watch Ford try to figure out what online identity theft is, alas, Firewall is not a comedy.
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