I’ve been hanging out with Russell Crowe. In the relatively recent past, I watched The Insider (great), L.A. Confidential (great), and The Pope’s Exorcist (not great, but fun). In the very recent past I watched Gladiator. And for this installment of Dad Movies, I watched Land of Bad, a contemporary war movie he stars in that’s currently on the Netflix Top 10 chart. You already know the Dad Shows name for this movie: Land of Dad.
Land of Bad got me thinking about Russell Crowe’s very interesting career, which is in a bit of a downturn at the moment. But I know how he can win another Oscar.
Land of Dad is a military rescue movie that reminds me of The Terminal List in how it’s pro-troop, anti-military. Liam Hemsworth is an inexperienced Air Force guy who embeds on a mission with some hardened Delta Force operators. His job is to coordinate with Russell Crowe, the drone pilot providing air support from a base in Las Vegas. Things go sideways, and Liam ends up trapped behind enemy lines alone. So Russell has to guide him to safety. Which he does, until his commanding officer orders him to take a break, at which another overly gung-ho guy comes in and almost gets Liam killed. This drone operator is too divorced from the reality of war to understand how dangerous his aggressiveness is for the people on the ground. But Russell Crowe has the experience to know to be patient and serious. Ultimately, Liam makes it out, and Russell teaches his fellow airmen a lesson about professionalism by smashing their TV with a golf club.
Land of Dad is a better movie than I was expecting. I hadn’t heard of it until it showed up on Netflix, so I was surprised to find out it actually had a somewhat legit theatrical run earlier this year, and isn’t a Netflix Original or something that went straight-to-VOD. Writer-director William Eubank put a lot of care into the movie. It has some style and point-of-view. The amount that the plot hinges on college basketball (the story takes place during March Madness) feels authentic. And Russell Crowe can elevate B material into A material.
I reflected on Russell Crowe’s career arc a little bit when I wrote about Gladiator last month, but there’s a lot more to it than what I briefly touched on. Russell Crowe used to be huge. At his peak in the late ‘90s/early ‘00s, he earned three consecutive Best Actor nominations and won one. But he suffered severe reputational damage when he threw a phone at a concierge in 2005, and his career was never the same after that. His decline coincided with an overall decline in the type of adult dramas he starred in. He’s always worked, but the projects have changed. He stayed big, but the pictures got small.
The last tentpole he starred in was Darren Aronofsky’s Noah in 2014, which I haven’t seen but want to, because it’s of a piece with mother!, which I loved. The last movie he starred in that left any cultural footprint was The Nice Guys in 2016, which I also haven’t seen but want to. (I have to spend a lot of time watching stuff like Those About to Die, so I miss a lot of movies I would definitely enjoy.) As most movie stars are compelled to do, he did a prestige limited series, 2019’s The Loudest Voice, in which he put on heavy prosthetic makeup to play Fox News founder Roger Ailes. He actually won a Golden Globe for it, but the combination of unappealing subject matter, middling reviews, and airing on neglect-era Showtime meant people didn’t watch it.
In the past couple of years, he’s entered the Liam Neeson phase of his career, pumping out small thrillers. He wrote, directed, and starred in a thriller called Poker Face in 2022 that has a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. He starred in two separate horror movies about exorcists. He’s in four movies released in 2024: Land of Bad; Sleeping Dogs, a crime thriller in which he plays a homicide detective with Alzheimer’s; The Exorcism, which has the premise “what if Linda Blair really was possessed by a demon while making The Exorcist?”; and Kraven the Hunter, the long-delayed Sony Spider-Man villain movie where he plays the title character’s dad. Take the short position on that one. He also appeared in the MCU (Thor: Love and Thunder, as Zeus), the DCEU (Man of Steel, as Jor-El), which as far as I can tell makes him the only actor to play different characters in three different superhero franchises. Putting Russell Crowe in a small role in a superhero movie makes it feel more important.
He’s not doing geezer teasers, where he takes a big paycheck to be in seven minutes of a really bad movie, like his fellow temperamental Australian Mel Gibson is doing. Crowe’s late-period movies are of fairly high quality, and he’s not phoning it in. He is of course the best part of Land of Bad. He once said “I'm the greatest actor in the world and I can make even shit sound good,” and while the dialogue in Land of Bad is far from shit, it isn’t James Ellroy, either. But Crowe locates the world-weariness and humor and brings it to life far beyond what’s on the page.
Part of it is how he looks now. He’s 60 years old, and isn’t trying to hide it. He’s put on weight and has a fully white beard. He looks good, but he doesn’t look like a movie star. He looks like a real bloke.
Hollywood is underutilizing him right now, but I predict that will change. He will age into Anthony Hopkins-style roles and earn at least one more Oscar nomination. And I have the perfect idea for a project to start his comeback: He should play Theodore Roosevelt. Not in a full cradle-to-grave biopic, but in a movie about his 1912 reelection campaign, when he got shot in an assassination attempt and still finished his speech. That comeback story didn’t have a happy ending for Teddy. But it will work out better for Russ. It will be the best Dad Movie of 2027.