I’ve been a big fan of Ryan Reynolds since Van Wilder: Party Liaison in 2002, when he played a role not unlike Otter, Tim Matheson’s suavely degenerate Big Man On Campus in Animal House (the link was intentional: Matheson played Van’s dad). I’ve enjoyed him, if not his work, intermittently ever since. I like his blandly cheesy mall-rat good looks, which can be wimped down for comedy or buffed up for action, and his willingness to be serious and very silly. And now he has given us what may be the performance of his career, as a kindly serial killer in the bracingly dark and violent black comedy The Voices – and over here in the US the thing gets a simultaneous VOD and limited theatrical release.
This seems typical, somehow, of a career that never quite seems to coalesce into coherence or acclaim. Reynolds made his bones in comedy, often of the proudly lowbrow variety, and has kept one foot in the genre ever since: Van Wilder, Smokin’ Aces, The Change-Up and The Proposal, alongside Sandra Bullock, who has good taste in offshore leading men (Reynolds is Canadian in all the best ways), plus cameos in the Harold and Kumar franchise and Seth McFarlane’s movies. Parallel to all that, there have been repeated attempts to sell the ripped-abs version of Reynolds as an action hero. First there was Blade: Trinity, then X-Men Origins: Wolverine, then the Green Lantern and, more recently, the train-wreck action comedy hybrid R.I.P.D., which bombed spectacularly and racked up a chastening 13% average at Rotten Tomatoes.
But here and there, as in Safe House and Buried, Reynolds knocks one out of the park. The Voices seems like a calling card movie to remind casting directors of his range and depth as a performer; its combination of kitschy sweetness and bottomless horror and violence aiming to jolt us out of any easy understanding of his abilities. And it’s effective: as a sweet loser toiling in a candy-coloured bathtub factory, he’s an inoffensive nobody; at home, as a severely mentally ill man off his medication. He’s got severed heads in the fridge, murder on his mind and a dog and a cat who behave like the angel and devil on Tom Hulce’s shoulders in Animal House, urging him on to ever greater feats of bloodletting. That a movie so tonally all over the place manages to hold itself together and keep the audience in its grasp is a testament to director Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), who’s working here in a completely different register from that of her earlier work.
It’s difficult to watch Reynolds’s career not come together. He has all the accoutrements of stardom – name recognition, marriages to noted beauties – everything except actual, marquee-topping success. He has turned into the male Jessica Biel: his every failed relaunch, like hers, is reminiscent of watching endless footage of 1960s Nasa rocket crashes. Would someone please do right by this man?
The Voices is in cinemas from Friday
