The Bizarre State of Will Smith's Career

[Applause] Captain Midnight this video is brought to you by brilliant on June 15th 2023 Will Smith's official YouTube channel uploaded a video called undon how not to get annihilated by zombies the second of his two ads for some kind of freet to-play zombie game in the video he riffs on different weapons in the game for 4 and 1/2 minutes on the post-apocalyptic garage set it's kind of a bizarre watch honestly not that it's unusual to see actors do ads or anything especially these days but it was still a little strange to see from the guy who spent so many years as perhaps the biggest star in all of Hollywood but years like 2007 when Will Smith could single-handedly power I Am Legend to massive success at the box office are long behind us and even though he successfully won an Oscar in a Prestige biopic I think his career was in an interesting state of flux even before the slap and all the endless online commentary on his marriage and that's what I want to talk about this week not the slap itself or the celebrity gossip about his personal life which honestly I'm very tired of but Will Smith the actor because to me that's far more interesting because as much as I've seen him in the news for the past year not much of it has been about the current state of his film career before I really get into it though I will say I am recording from the road so if my audio sounds a little different this week that would be why just think the person that uses the head can always defeat the person that's just trying to use their hands now remember that cuz the mo you know four years ago I made a video called The Great and frustrating career of Will Smith where I said that Smith has always been one of my favorite actors the guy is a Charisma Powerhouse with a lot more range than I think he's of often given credit for but I also said that he tends to play it very safe with his choice of roles maybe too safe it's been interesting to see his fellow 9s and 2000s Mega film stars navigate the current film landscape some like Leonardo DiCaprio have mostly retreated from the Blockbuster space carving out a career of often great films with beloved directors others have set up successful franchises for themselves like Kiana Reeves with John Wick or even an older star like Denzel Washington whose equalizer films may not be on the same level as Wick but have proved very reliable for Denzel and at least I think have actually improved with every installment this has allowed all three of those actors to more or less keep doing what they want without becoming a cog in someone else's franchise Machinery now Will Smith never really went down either of those paths outside of Bad Boys which took a huge break but now now seems to be roaring back to life men and black was very dependent on his chemistry with Tommy Lee Jones and then was taken away from them in the terrible men and black International same with Independence Day 2 I still can't believe they tried to make another Independence Day Without Will Smith awful idea but yeah pure action Vehicles like the very technically impressive Gemini man also failed to connect with audiences which to be fair was from the often great director Ang Lee he also did a animated movie with spies in Disguise which was definitely greeted with a shrug and maybe as the result of not having something like Wick or equalizer we've seen Smith take roles like Deadshot in Suicide Squad which was quickly shunted the side and rebooted without him and the liveaction Aladdin which was actually a huge hit but obviously more of the credit there was given to the property rather than Smith himself I think I've said in the past that one of his more overlooked films is 2015 15's focus with Margot Robbie sure it's nothing overly ambitious but it's a rock solid crime Caper film that gets a lot of mileage out of the Charisma of its Stars I feel like if that hadn't completely gone unnoticed and had been marketed better probably with a title that wasn't so nothing it could have provided Smith with the kind of franchise stability that other older stars have found I know I'd show up for more slick Will Smith con job movies so those are his recentish popcorn films and aside from some box office bright spots like bad boys for life and Aladdin it hasn't been super smooth sailing I mean I guess I didn't even get to Bright the uh orc cop movie on Netflix which yeah anyway box office hits aren't everything right so what about his smaller more personal projects you know the prestige or art housee stuff well this is where I think Smith or Smith's team has never quite had the taste in scripts that some of his cont Temporaries have he did win an Oscar last year so clearly before things completely went off the rails they were doing something right I don't think King Richard is anything all that special honestly as far as these kind of glossy biopics go but he did do a great job in a film that felt like it was designed in a lab to win him an Oscar that's the thing with Will Smith I feel like when he's called upon to stretch his performance outside of the usual Charming movie star Persona he is good at it he absolutely has the chops and I think he's demonstrated that time and again but the smart calculation of King Richard aside he and his team have been so bad at choosing Prestige dramas 2015's concussion a biopic where he starred as a doctor who studied CTE in American football garnered a really lukewarm reception including accusations that it had been re-edited to appease the NFL and honestly Smith feels a little bit miscast there even if he does have a few genuinely affecting moments there's the baffling collateral Beauty which I'm sure I touched on last time it's this Dopey magical realism drama with Kira nightly and Edward Norton that I'm kind of amazed got made in the first place I want to admire how sincere this thing is but it's so trickly and lame that I can't even do that then last year there was emancipation from the director of training day and Olympus Has Fallen Antoine fuka a really tense historic iCal action movie about an enslaved Man On The Run in 1863 now I actually think this is a more interesting and effectively suspenseful film than it was given credit for at the time and maybe one of the director's best now a lot of critics don't seem to agree and between being an apple plus original and being completely overshadowed by Smith's personal life it didn't make much of an impact I like it though something tells me that time will be kind to this one or maybe I just overrate any fuka project that's halfway decent because I like old school journeyman action directors I mean have you seen Southpaw recently that movie's awesome getting back to Smith though with some rare exceptions there's something about his choices in non genre films that have always felt kind of off and I think in his Memoir will we get a glimpse into why that is early on in his career he set out to become the biggest movie star in the world and to that end him and his manager created something of a formula for picking movies that would Propel him there he wrote that they studied the box office list of the biggest films of all time and quote what we found is at the center there were always special effects so it was always special effects there was always creatures there was always a love story so we started looking for movies that had special effects creatures and a love story you can see this exact line of thinking in Men In Black and Independence Day so obviously they were on to something at least for a Time but you also see something else in that time period that Smith would rarely do again working with a very very high-profile aour director Michael man on Ali Ali has honestly never been one of my favorite Man movies but Smith is great in it and I wish Smith would work with these kind of directors more in films that aren't biopics like I don't know how many people have noticed but Will Smith has just quietly done so many biopics in my last video on Smith I criticized him a bit for turning down the role of D Jango and D Jango Unchained after Quinton Tarantino wouldn't let his team do a rewrite on it and I got a little bit of backlash in the comments for that in retrospect yeah if the ultraviolent movie wasn't the kind of material he connected with or wanted to sign on to because he felt it was too dark or nihilistic then obviously he shouldn't do the movie but I think the issue is less D Jango specifically and more that he seems very very reluctant to sign on to anything that was wasn't a safe bet that his team had almost complete control over it's hard to picture Smith in a Chris Nolan Jordan Peele or Martin scorey movie these days even when he worked with ight in aftere Earth it was at a very low E in the director's career where Smith had the clout to bring in his team and significantly reshape the script and though it really did not work out there I do understand that impulse Will Smith had a very well-crafted movie star Persona that was was incredibly successful it only made sense to be protective of that image and try to be very selective about roles that leaned into it in the best light but you know that brings us to today between that ill- fated Oscar night and the past couple of years of reporting about Will Smith's personal life I think it's safe to say that that movie star Persona has become far more complicated at best and maybe kind of shattered at worst that process has been uncomfortable it's been weird and I'm sure fairly embarrassing for all involved but there's a reason I'm not calling this video the end of Will Smith's career or something like that because as much as people have mocked and criticized the guy for the past couple of years I do think there might be a small Silver Lining to be found here at least as far as his film work goes that Memoir I mentioned earlier will it might be hard to remember now but all the articles about that book were making things a little strange for Will Smith far before The Slap happened I read it immediately after release and I went into it expecting a very manicured on brand portrait of him the kind that you find in a lot of celebrity autobiographies like this and what I got instead was far more raw and personal and sure I don't doubt that even that was calculated to a certain degree by a PR team trying to win an oscar but there was something genuinely unflattering and uncomfortable about some of the stories in there and I came away from it thinking that Will Smith was ready to move on from the brand of Will Smith the light familyfriendly entertainer of parents just don't understand and Men In Black who is always up for some fun wholesome laughs and action and now for better or worse that image has been changed forever how that happened was you know not great but I think now that he doesn't have that very precise image to maintain why not try to get more artistically daring with his career why not take a great lead or even supporting role in a Paul Thomas Anderson or bong John ho film or seek out exciting younger talent that would have a hard time getting financed without his name and place his trust in them at this point really like what is there to lose why not take some bold film roll risks that the Will Smith of 2005 never would have on the big screen speaking of 2005 have you ever heard of Will Smith's hip-hop album that came out that year lost and found after the slap I remember a lot of people online discovering how strange and kind of angry that album was like the weird Will Smith of 2022 had been hiding in plain sight all along and no one noticed the thing is though I wasn't shocked by lost and found I knew that album very very well because in 2005 I was a weird homeschooled kid in seventh grade that was listening to Will Smith instead of Kanye or TI I just liked the fresh prince of belir and ioot that that much I guess I I was 12 okay but one thing that comes through very clear in Lost and Found is Smith's insecurity about not being accepted by his hip-hop peers it's all over that album recognizable to me even as a kid and I would say that sense of insecurity applied to everything is felt throughout his Memoir as well and look I'm just about the last person who is going to weigh in on if he was actually a talented rapper or not I don't feel especially qualified to do that I would will say unequivocally that I think he can be a great actor Beyond just Will Smith the movie star brand and even though his next movie is Another Bad Boys film which is probably a safe career choice after the past few years he's had I do think there's so much left unexplored for him as an actor and an artist separate from chasing the dream of being the biggest movie star in the world we see glimpses of it in movies like Pursuit of Happiness and I am Legend and I want to see that on screen and in the hands of filmmakers who can mold it into something new and exciting Will Smith has already been the biggest movie star in the world and the past decade or so has felt like him desperately trying to climb back to that before suddenly and violently closing that chapter of his life forever how he went about that was bizarre and I think pretty clearly a mistake but it also sets up a potential new chapter and as someone who has always really liked the guy's work and followed his films Clos mostly I hope ultimately it can be a worthwhile one you've probably never won an Oscar the same night you did the weirdest thing of your life but maybe you're also looking for a new chapter okay that transition was pretty bad but seriously brilliant is not brilliant helps you tackle science math and computer science Concepts like Ai and neural networks in incredible ways that always fit into your schedule even if you can only spare 15 minutes a day on a tablet computer or even in your phone one that's really worth looking into is 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Channel: captainmidnight

Views: 428,521

Keywords: Will Smith, Oscars, Bad Boys, I am Legend, Captain Midnight, captainmidnight, The Slap, Chris Rock, Men in Black, Jada, movies, trailers

Id: N6BEBkhIxoY

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 25 2023