Ryan Reynolds has been one of Hollywood’s most popular actors for nearly 20 years. He’s developed a likable public persona, become a master of marketing and entrepreneurship, befriended the kind of Hollywood talent many people would sell an organ for — and he’s married to Blake Lively.
Yet, this popularity often comes with the question of the quality of his filmography. And yes, it has its share of failures. But looking at all of Ryan Reynolds’ films from Future (2000) to IF (2004), I saw things you can’t imagine: Reynolds as an amnesiac god married to Melissa McAthy and posing as a TV scriptwriter; I saw him play a beloved schoolteacher with terminal cancer in an ABC family movie; I saw him switch places with Jason Bateman after urinating in a magic fountain; I saw him as a novelist mourning the death of his mother played by Julia Roberts, all while his abusive father played by Willem Dafoe looks on.
But I digress, because I’ve found that even his less-than-great films are made immensely more watchable simply by his presence. And that’s the problem. He’s not an actor you’d describe as a chameleon – though he’s shown more layers over the course of his career than is often given credit for, and one of his best performances was in the mediocre The captive (2014), which aired on DirecTV. But he’s a welcome presence even in the lowest moments of his filmography. And in the highest moments, he’s a nimble improviser and a force that will keep you on the edge of your seat. And that’s true whether he’s gleefully decapitating bad guys or struggling to escape the coffin he’s been buried in underground. Ryan Reynolds is an extremely watchable actor, even if the reason why isn’t always quantifiable.
With the release of his passion project, Deadpool and WolverineI’m going back over his best films and offering you the ranking below.
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13. Life (2017)
I have a hard time resisting a well-crafted B-movie with a star-studded cast, and Daniel Espinosa. Life certainly fits the mold. Of course, it’s a riff on Extraterrestrial (1979). But it was not the first and will not be the last. Following the success of dead Pool (2016), screenwriters Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese reteamed with Ryan Reynolds for this sci-fi horror film in which the crew of an international space station discovers a rapidly evolving life form on Mars, which they dub Calvin. Reynolds, alongside Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, and Olga Dihovichnaya, play scientists whose study of Calvin quickly spirals into a horrific and bloody situation that literally spirals out of their control.
Although Reynolds has been heavily featured in the marketing, his character Rory Adams meets a gruesome end early on. Despite this, the actor leaves an impression, and his character…
