![]() ![]() You don’t see a performance in these tossed-off vehicles - you just see Jackson playing Jackson. I just happen to have a very interesting job that’s kind of cool!” While that’s true, sometimes his oversaturation can turn Jackson’s onscreen attributes into shtick. “When I was a kid, all the adults in my house got up and went to work every day. “I grew up in a working-class family,” he once said. Jackson has always credited his prolific pace to lessons he learned as a boy. (And that’s not even mentioning the straight-up genre stuff he’s toplined, like Formula 51 and Barely Lethal). Consequently, he can play, say, a talk-show host in the RoboCop remake, a gung-ho army colonel in Kong: Skull Island, and an American ambassador in The Legend of Tarzan and, really, it’s all the same character. And as his celebrity has grown over this century, he’s been known to take parts where he can just do his Sam Jackson thing without straining too hard. (In 2016, Harrison Ford took the title from Jackson.) But the explanation - which will become obvious once you start scrolling - is that Jackson makes a lot of films. ![]() Jackson was the highest-grossing star of all time, which would seem like an extraordinary feat considering that he’s not thought of in the same A-list superstar company as Tom Cruise or Will Smith. In 2011, the Guinness Book of World Records declared that Samuel L. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016) But even with the performances we chose to exclude from these rankings, it’s remarkable what a vast and varied career the 68-year-old actor has had: Jackson has certainly made up for lost time. 2.” We decided nobody needed to revisit 1994’s Hail Caesar, which is not the Coen Brothers’ movie but is Anthony Michael Hall’s directorial debut and features the first onscreen pairing of Jackson and Robert Downey Jr., long before their Marvel movies. For instance, we bypassed 1989’s Sea of Love, where he’s billed as “Black Guy,” or 1981’s Ragtime, in which he’s “Gang Member No. But this meant drawing the line somewhere. Other than that, we ranked any performance that was a little bit different - and ones that were at least minimally significant in his canon. Jackson impersonation.” They’re all essentially the same movie, and he’s the same in all of them. This can sometimes lead to a similarity in his performances, so in the interest of economy and our sanity, we bunched a few of his films together under one category: “Samuel L. Jackson has been in comedies, dramas, actioners, horror films, and some truly inspired kitsch, and he always brings his distinctive oomph to each role.Īs people trying to rank every one of his movies can now attest, Jackson is also famously busy, working constantly, like a guy who didn’t catch his big break until his late 40s and is trying to make every second count. Jackson, which is another way of saying: No movie with Samuel L. The film critic David Thomson once wrote that “no one survives more bad material with humor and dignity” than Samuel L. Photo-Illustration: Maya Robinson/Vulture ![]()
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