Ten Movies

We have come to the end of our Harrison Ford season of the Ten Movies podcast and - in so coming - have learned many truths about Mr. Ford, America, and ourselves. We have learned what makes Harrison Ford a relatable everyman in his action hero roles - specifically, an air of befuddlement. The Rock and Jason Statham could never. For the rest of our findings - and for The Definitive Ranking of Harrison Ford's Movies (TM), we encourage you to listen to this episode. Brian and Hemal have enjoyed taking this journey with you. Make sure you subscribe to Ten Movies to see what iconic movie star we get into next season.

Though some of his other roles are more iconic, ‘Blade Runner' is perhaps Harrison Ford's most celebrated movie, at least in the world of genre films. Which, of course, made his career and has since gone on to entirely swallow contemporary cinema. But unlike Star Wars or Indiana Jones, Blade Runner is not a beloved franchise suitable for additional revenue generation in the form of lunchboxes and animated spinoffs. It's dark, claustrophobic, and confusing; a slow-paced futuristic neo-noir with a synthesizer score so heavy-handed you'll feel like one of those Raymond Chandler private eyes that are always getting hit in the back of the head and left in an alley. Though produced in the long-ago era of 1982, ‘Blade Runner' depicts the grimy, corporate-owned, neon-drenched Los Angeles of the not-so-distant future. Technically, the story takes place a few years ago, but that seemed far off when they made the movie, and the actual year 2019 came and went without moon colonies or outlaw cyborgs. Speaking of which, Harrison Ford spends the movie hunting down these rogue “replicants”, but - refreshingly! - his success is as much a matter of luck as of skill, and their deaths seem tragic, rather than badass. In the end, he realizes some stuff about our shared humanity. Brian and Hemal both enjoyed the film, though they admitted that, like ‘The Empire Strikes Back' from earlier in the season, its legacy is such that it's hard to take it on its terms and just watch it as a movie. While ‘Blade Runner' did not come to dominate popular culture in the fashion of Star Wars, its legacy in science fiction film and storytelling is just as significant.

This is an odd duck in the Harrison Ford canon. Instead of his usual decent everyman hero, here he plays a deranged libertarian inventor who becomes increasingly unmoored from reality - endangered a young River Phoenix and the rest of his hapless family in the process. Brian and Hemal had mixed feelings about ‘The Mosquito Coast'. It's a movie with a strong point of view. And it's some of the best acting we've seen from Harrison Ford; he really gets inside this largely unlikable character. In fact, it's the exceedingly rare movie where you forget you're watching Harrison Ford. But it's also dark and claustrophobic - a compelling movie, but not a fun watch. We did think the movie had a surprisingly sophisticated stance on some of the issues it touches on, from colonialism to racism to unhealthy family power dynamics. Rather than loudly letting you know that the characters in thrall to these pathologies are bad people, it trusts the audience to spend time with a character and draw their own conclusions.

Harrison Ford had it all - a beautiful wife, a flourishing medical career and a big chunky beard. But then a sinister one-armed man murdered his wife and the bumbling cop blamed him and he had no choice but to become The Fugitive. Being The Fugitive is a tough business. He spends most of the movie running around Chicago being resourceful - forging documents, stealing other documents, and looking for the truth. As a result, he ends up not having any reason to talk to any other characters. But there's no shortage of clever banter and flinty charm because lawman Tommy Lee Jones is also running around Chicago looking for Harrison Ford, along with his misfit band of clever US Marshals. Towards the very end of the movie they throw in a bunch of complicated extra stuff about an evil pharmaceutical company, but mostly it's a classic cat-and-mouse thriller.

A glossy, modern Hollywood western movie made with extreme attention to detail and featuring beloved A-List stars? And also aliens show up? The premise is solid gold - but the execution, sadly, left much to be desired. In ‘Cowboys & Aliens', released in 2011 and directed by Jon Favreau, Harrison Ford plays an excessively curmudgeonly ranch boss in the old West whose thoroughly unlikeable son is kidnapped by space aliens. Meanwhile, Daniel Craig is wandering around suffering from amnesia and bearing a mysterious alien weapon on his arm. (See? This all sounds terrific.) As they compete for the “most craggily handsome man”, the two stars assemble a gang of people representing every Western movie character stereotype and head off to fight the aliens. Olivia Wilde goes with them, who turns out to also be an alien, but with a different flavor. This explains her mysterious knowledge but does not explain why she's always gazing adoringly at Daniel Craig and taking her clothes off. Eventually, they have a big battle, and the two characters who aren't white guys get killed. All in all, a bit of a muddle, which was perhaps foreshadowed by the fact that the script had six authors. Brian and Hemal felt that the filmmakers lavished a great deal of love and care on the “Cowboys” part of the movie, while the “Aliens” part was given short shrift. In the movies that inform the alien component of the film, like ‘Aliens' and ‘Predator', the extraterrestrial entities are genuinely menacing, sources of dread and suspense. But here they are just rampaging monsters with laser weapons and flimsy motives. Worse, though, is the degree to which the movie makes no attempt to even acknowledge, much less answer, the outdated ideologies of the Western genre. One can perhaps understand why a movie from, say, 1975 might depict women and Native characters in subservient or unimportant roles and not question the right of European settlers to do whatever they wanted, but it's baffling that a movie made in The Year of Our Lord 2011 would do the same.

Exciting? Certainly. Preposterous? Absolutely. But will you enjoy Harrison Ford as the president of the United States, personally karate-fighting and machine-gunning an array of sneering terrorists who have seized his airplane? If you are a good American, you will. In ‘Air Force One', a 1997 action thriller, a band of evil Russian separatists takes over the president's very special airplane with the help of a treacherous Secret Service agent - including the president and his family.. (If the filmmakers had just waited a few years, they could have just used standard-issue Russians, who have once again assumed their historical role in American cultural life as villains, but this was a brief period when we were all pals.) Unfortunately they did not reckon with President James Marshall, an almost comically capable executive, who can fly jets, speak fluent Russian and is a master of hand-to-hand combat. So he spends most of the movie sneaking around the plane picking the bad guys off one by one, which - you will not be surprised to learn - culminates in a spectacular finale (with some of the most dogshit CGI you've ever seen, as crashing a real 747 was not in the budget.) Hemal felt that ‘Air Force One' was a terrific movie - tense, exciting and fun. Brian felt the same, but did note that it was incredibly silly. But if you've a Sunday evening to spare and a plateful of pork chops to enjoy, this is the movie for you.

Though we know him more for action and adventure roles, Harrison Ford has been known to try his hand at a romantic comedy or two. Turns out that craggy handsomeness and twinkle-eyed charm are just as useful for wooing the ladies as it is for fending off space aliens. In ‘Working Girl', Melanie Griffith plays a gritty outer-borough striver who decides to perpetrate identity fraud to get ahead in the business world, which she has to do because Sigourney Weaver is a mean boss. Amid these shenanigans, she meets Harrison Ford, and they decide to team up - in mergers AND acquisitions if you catch our drift. Brian and Hemal thoroughly enjoyed ‘Working Girl' as a well-constructed late 80s gem, though we could not help but remark upon the many ways in which class and gender politics have shifted since it was released. Also, the hair and the shoulder pads, sweet merciful Jesus.

If there's a more iconic Harrison Ford role than Indiana Jones, it's Han Solo. The vest! The blaster! The roguish ne'er-do-well grin! The giant dog sidekick! He is the dashing space pirate by which all future dashing space pirates will be measured - and found wanting. We chose ‘The Empire Strikes Back' over the original; ‘Star Wars' not only because it features more Han Solo, but because the movie hangs more on Ford's portrayal of the character - not just as a hero, but as an oddly contemporary aspect of the film. Amidst the flying monsters and space wizards, Ford's presence keeps the movie human - but not so much that he's winking at all the made-up stuff. It's a fine line. We also enjoyed - as many have before - the bravura of the film. Somebody makes a surprise hit space adventure with the good guys flying around and blowing up the bad guys and you gotta figure the studio wanted “that, but more” for the sequel, but instead, George Lucas and company gave us a story about failure and sacrifice, rather than triumph. Luke flunks out of Jedi school and they cut off his hand and Han Solo gets frozen in carbonite. Good stuff.

If you're keen on unspoken but palpable yearning, ‘Witness' will be right up your alley. If, on the other hand, you enjoy things happening, this may not be the movie for you. In ‘Witness', the first of Harrison Ford's two mid-80s outings with director Peter Weir, our hero plays a gritty Philadelphia detective who has to hole up at a remote farmstead in Amish country and spend most of the movie gazing longingly at Kelly McGillis. He's doing this because Kelly McGillis's impossibly wide-eyed son witnessed a murder and they have to stay off the grid so the corrupt cops don't find them. Eventually they do, of course, and there's some gunplay and what-not, but most of the movie is restrained to the point of placidity. There is, no joke, a 20+ minute scene where all the characters raise a barn. But Brian and Hemal agreed that the barn-raising scene was actually kind of great - and they liked the movie's perspective on violence: despite what every single action movie would have us believe, it is rarely the best course of action. Brian was a little down on the film's ponderous pace and lack of plot, but Hemal was taken in by all the tacit Amish steaminess.

It's hard to think of a more iconic actor than Harrison Ford. And it's equally hard to think of a less interesting character than Jack Ryan, the protagonist of countless espionage thrillers. And yet, America loves Harrison Ford in this role. “How dare YOU, sir?” he barks angrily at the president, who is corrupt and venal. But he still calls him “sir”, because he respects the office. Yeah, that's what this character is like. The plot of ‘Clear & Present Danger' is convoluted and not entirely plausible, but the movie is well-made. At any given moment, you know what Jack Ryan is up to, what clandestine information he's working to uncover and who's trying to blow him up. Your efforts as a viewer here are aided by the movie's relentless binary of good and evil. The bad guys are always bad, and can be counted on to do bad things, and the good guys are always good and noble-hearted. One wonders if there are actually this many high-ranking CIA officers who are quite so devoted to honestly following the rules.