It’s not hard to argue that – among Hollywood icons – Harrison Ford sits pretty close to the top of the list. First blasting onto the scene as the coolest sci-fi character of all time, Han Solo, in Star Wars, throughout his career, no actor has ever been as good at inhabiting larger-than-life characters. If he’d only played Han, his place in the pantheon of actors would be guaranteed, but in the middle of his run, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg also hired him to play Indiana Jones (as a last-minute replacement for Tom Selleck), giving him another iconic character under his belt, who – perhaps – is an even bigger pop culture icon than Han.
Throughout the eighties and nineties no one had a better run than Ford, with him alternating acclaimed dramas like Witness, The Mosquito Coast, Presumed Innocent, and more with his blockbuster fare. In 1992, he was tapped to take over for Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan, giving him another iconic character to play in two massive techno-thriller blockbusters. he also headlined The Fugitive and Air Force One, which were two of the highest-grossing action movies of the nineties.
Yet, around the 2000s, Ford started to slip. Too many of his movies felt like lazy programmers, with movies like Hollywood Homicide and Firewall low-key and lacking the energy (and action) of Ford’s best work. His return as Indiana Jones in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull also proved to be highly divisive, and he seemed reluctant to give audiences what they wanted, opting instead to star in would-be blockbusters, like Cowboys vs Aliens, that whiffed at the box office. While his icon status isn’t being threatened anytime soon, Ford does seem to be out-of-touch in a way his contemporaries like Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood never seemed to be, with Dial of Destiny a huge money loser, and his role as Thaddeus Ross in Captain America: Brave New World also seemingly leaving audiences with a bit of a sour taste, with only his role on Taylor Sheridan’s 1923 really capturing the zeitgeist. So WTF Happened? Some may say he simply got older, but his slide began at least twenty years ago, with his increasing reliance on creaky, out-moulded star vehicles. But, at the end of the day, when your legacy is as secured as Ford’s, does it even matter? We’ll dive into it in this episode of WTF Happened to this Celebrity.
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