In The Pacifier, macho man Vin Diesel, best known for his roles in action flicks xXx, The Fast and the Furious and Pitch Black, does comedy for a change. He’s hardly the first action hero to try his hand at racking up the laughs instead of a body count. Of course, audiences aren’t always willing to go along with the joke, leaving many of these tough eggs with egg on their face.
Muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger carved out his career as a sword-wielding barbarian and a relentless killer cyborg, but the box office still went cha-ching when he started teaming with the likes of Danny DeVito, playing mismatched brothers in Twins. But the bloated actioner Last Action Hero sank and burned with a girly $50 million at the box office.
Hits: Kindergarten Cop, Twins
Misses: Junior, Jingle All the Way, Last Action Hero
Success rate: 60 percent. We all love Ah-nuld, but he’s at his best when delivering mayhem along with the punch lines.
After wringing nearly every last drop from the Rocky and Rambo franchise, Sylvester Stallone needed a new gig. So, hey, if this comedy thing worked for Tony Danza, maybe it could work for him, the Italian Stallion probably figured. The result was often howlers like Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. And it’s not like anyone saw the third Spy Kids film for Sly. Did they?
Hits: Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, Tango & Cash
Misses: Oscar, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Over the Top, Rhinestone
Success Rate: 20 percent. We’d say stick to his action films, but it’s not like those are any great shakes lately either.
Bruce Willis started off as wisecracking P.I. on TV’s Moonlighting, so it was a real risk when he headlined his first action film, Die Hard. But yippee-ki-yay, Bruce, the action star was a hit. His vanity vehicle Hudson Hawk was a notorious flop, ditto more indie attempts at cracking our funny bone. He sent up his tough guy image as a hitman named “Jimmy the Tulip” in The Whole Nine Yards, but no one seemed interested in the sequel.
Hits: Bandits, Disney’s The Kid, Death Becomes Her, Look Who’s Talking (voice only), The Whole Nine Yards.
Misses: Hudson Hawk, The Whole Ten Yards, Breakfast of Champions, Four Rooms, North
Success Rate: 60 percent. Audiences like a wisecracking Willis–but more so when he’s outwitting terrorists.
Mel Gibson rose to fame as leather-clad Outback hellion Mad Max, and when Hollywood recruited him, it was mostly to star in serious dramas like The Year of Living Dangerously. We didn’t see Mel’s true comic streak until the action-comedy buddy Lethal Weapon flicks, in which he unleashed his inner Stooge, while sporting a mullet, no less. Today, we’re more likely to think “ultra-violent Biblical epic” than “Three Stooges,” when his name is mentioned, but you have to admit that even the battle scenes in Braveheart had their slapstick moments.
Hits: What Women Want, Chicken Run (voice only), Bird on a Wire
Misses: Air America
Success Rate: 90 percent. Mel can seemingly do no wrong, whether funny or serious or in front of or behind the camera.
Film heavy Robert De Niro successfully sent up his own mob image, cultivated in such films as GoodFellas, in Analyze This. He scored big box office by intimidating the heck out of Ben Stiller in Meet the Parents and its even more successful sequel. De Niro‘s finest comic moments just might be as a bounty hunter stuck with mob informant Charles Grodin in the overlooked buddy comedy Midnight Run. The middling We’re No Angels paired De Niro with another tough guy, Sean Penn, as criminals disguising themselves as priests. It was a remake of the Humphrey Bogart film of the same name.
Hits: Shark Tale (voice only), Meet the Fockers, Meet the Parents, Analyze This
Misses: Analyze That, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Mad Dog and Glory, We’re No Angels.
Success Rate: 60 percent. Do we think he’s funny? Yes, we’re too scared not too laugh, most of the time.
Speaking of Sean Penn, in case you’ve forgotten what a funny, funny dude he can be, just go rent Fast Times at Ridgemont High again. Since then, comedy and Penn have been about as good a combination as…Penn and then-wife Madonna were in the roundly reviled flop Shanghai Surprise. He’s since opted to take the deadly serious path, whether it’s as a murderer on death row in Dead Man Walking or vengeance-seeking dad in Mystic River.
Hits: Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Misses: Shanghai Surprise, We’re No Angels
Success Rate: 30 percent. Sadly, Penn will probably never stoop to make a comedy again, especially now that he’s got an Oscar.
And how about some old-time tough guys going soft?
Humphrey Bogart, one of the toughest of cinema’s legends, didn’t make many comedies, but among them is John Huston‘s Beat the Devil, an odd send-up of the intrigue-in-a-foreign-land films he had become associated with. The movie didn’t catch on and, despite a small cult following, is not one of his better known films. He fared better opposite lovely Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, although he seemed a tad too dour to be winning her hand in the end.
Hits: Sabrina, and if hard-pressed The African Queen (which is really more romance than comedy).
Misses: Beat the Devil
Success Rate: 40 percent. Bogie is best hard-boiled, audiences then, and now, agree.
Tightlipped toughie Clint Eastwood, who seemingly would just as soon shoot a man as squint at him, found unlikely success in Every Which Way But Loose, in which his co-star was an orangutan! Most of his other attempts at humor–such as trying to sing in Paint Your Wagon–have died like so many faceless Italian extras in a spaghetti western. At least in his most recent film, Million Dollar Baby, he had us laughing at him before he made us cry with him.
Hits: Every Which Way But Loose, Any Which Way You Can, Space Cowboys
Misses: Paint Your Wagon, Pink Cadillac, Two Mules for Sister Sara
Success Rate: 60 percent. Who knew Clint could be this funny, with or without his primate pal?
Marlon Brando, the Don himself, lampooned his iconic Godfather role in The Freshman. The restless acting genius tried his hand at a variety of genres, including musicals and period dramas, and even the occasional comedy, such as the farcical Bedtime Story (later remade as Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.) When your co-stars are Charlie (er, Charles) Sheen and Thomas Haden Church, you know you’re a long way from A Streetcar Named Desire, as Brando was in the 1999 straight-to-video laffer, Free Money.
Hits: Guys and Dolls, The Freshman
Misses: Free Money
Success Rate: 40 percent. The eccentric Brando was more often funny strange (see: The Island of Dr. Moreau) than funny ha-ha.
