Anyone else find him a bit.... 'limited'
I will probably get ripped to pieces for this, but please hear me out: The other day I involuntarily endured a trailer for a recent Adam Sandler movie (where he also plays his twin sister) and I was rather startled to hear that Al Pacino himself was actually doing a cameo there.
My initial reaction was: "Boy, he came a long way from all the great films he made in the past", but then something strange happened: I started thinking about "all the great films he made in the past" and given a closer look found Al Pacino's past as an actor neither considerably great, nor considerably groundbreaking in an artistic sense.
Let´s leave out Michael Corleone here (at least in GF 1 and 2) as this is a performance beyond criticism, and let´s also omit "Dog Day Afternoon" in which his stereotypical "nervous tough guy" had not yet become a cliché - the only performance after the 1970s for which I can truely give him credit is Tony Montana with which he wrote film history - but apart from this small handful of roles what is there? I look into Pacino´s recent filmography and I see little else but disposable cop-films; I grab a random movie from the 90s or 2000s and I see the same character over and over again - brooding, volatile guy, constantly on the edge and shouting on the top of his voice, no matter if appropriate or not.
Just check out this scene from "Heat" and then tell me if this is a line you would expect to come in this form from a normal cop, or if it is just Pacino playing a Pacino-character: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5vlco4yvSc (and for extra laughs, just skip through these 11 seconds frame by frame and cringe over the 40 different histrionic expressions that Pacino puts up in such a small time).
And ironically, the only performance he won an Oscar for was for a movie ("Scent of a woman") in which he took his overacting to new extremes to invent a character who had no depth or demons whatsoever but that seemed closer to a cartoon character.
I know that the discussion about Pacino´s "range" is not exactly new, neither is the revelation that he´s playing himself in many of his movies. But I still find it worthwhile to draw attention to this matter every once in a while: Have we ever seen Pacino transform (intellectually and physically) for a role? Has he every played a character that was completely beyond anything you would have thought him capable of? Is there a movie where you would say to yourself: *beep* this is actually PACINO there? Holy Crap, what did he do to himself?
I more and more get the feeling that Pacino has stopped "acting" somewhere in the 90s and has instead come up with the philosophy to "give the people what they want" - those kind of people who are munching their popcorn and sipping their sodas in the theatre, eagerly waiting for his tirade to start ("Oh boy, here he goes again!")
So please, don´t get me wrong; I might have been harsh, but I deliberately did not include any comparison to other directors, as starting a discussion about "Actor XYZ being better/worse" was not my intention; I am also far away from actually bashing Pacino - let me just put it this way. For a man who has for almost 40 years been labelled "one of the greatest actors of all time", I found his range of expression as well as his choice of characters rather "limited", to put it mildly.
So there, I´ve said it. You can shoot me on the spot, burn me at the stake - or you can simply give me your personal opinion as this is what I came for.
Thanks in advance