This month’s Alien: Covenant marks Ridley Scott’s 24th feature film in what has been a long, influential, albeit uneven and sometimes flat out maddening career. From the highest of highs to the lowest of lows, Ridley Scott’s oeuvre is as inconsistent in quality as his late brother Tony’s was consistent in aesthetics and tone. He has his strengths – world building and managing epic scope – and his weaknesses – creating three-dimensional characters. These aspects aren’t always true, but they are more consistent than anything in his career.
Digging through Scott’s entire filmography, spanning epic classics and replacement-level thriller dreck, it was tough to try and rank some of the lesser works above the each other. But with careful viewing I began to disseminate just how much effort Scott was putting into his craft from movie to movie. It helped shape a list top heavy with older films and, unfortunately, a heap of Scott’s most recent work filling out the bottom of this list.
Here we go…
6. Matchstick Men (2003)
Matchstick Men is one of the bigger departures in Ridley Scott’s career. Following one huge undertaking after another with Gladiator, Hannibal, and Black Hawk Down, Scott stepped back and managed to refocus on character-driven storytelling. He also managed to grab Nicolas Cage right before he became a VOD punchline.
Cage is all ticks and twitches as a phobic con man, the loon to Sam Rockwell’s quiet underling. Then Cage’s daughter shows up, and the movie is off and running. The film crackles with energy, but in a different way from Scott’s bigger pictures. All the energy here is in the performances from Cage and Alison Lohman as his daughter, and the plot zips along through the grifter twists and turns. This one is fun.
