A Daily Beast write-up covers the polarizing reactions that Brendan Fraser’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” performance has been getting.
In ‘Killers,’ Fraser plays William Hale’s attorney, W.S. Hamilton. He has seven minutes of screentime, and hams up in every single one of those minutes. His thick Southern accent is distracting, ditto his facial expressions. As Daily Beast writes, Fraser “makes a habit of suddenly shouting.”
He’s the blatant flaw of the whole film. For close to 3 hours, I was engrossed by ‘Killers,’ it was near perfection and then, for a few scenes, Fraser took me out of the film.
I can’t grasp what Fraser was thinking in his delivery of “dumb boy!” He just looks pissed off every time he’s onscreen. Even when he isn’t talking.
He draws focus: His creased mouth and bulging cheeks suggest a man who accidentally swallowed a frog and is trying to play it cool.
Fraser’s Hamilton can be best described as “jarring.” Reactions to his performance on social media are also perplexing — he’s being compared to the Kool-Aid Man, some are asking editor Thelma Schoonmaker to edit him out, with others implying his performance is so bad that he should give back his Oscar.
Then there’s the few who are actually defending this insane performance, a person claims that Fraser “understood the assignment.” Another defender explains that Fraser's performance perfectly matched what Scorsese wanted Fraser to do.
Was this a deliberate choice on the part of Scorsese? I sure hope not. A reader pointed out yesterday that it was not necessarily a case of Fraser having been miscast, but, rather, misdirected by Scorsese.
Regardless, I think a more talented actor would have done a better job in the role of Hamilton. I get what Scorsese was going for here, but Fraser just didn’t seem to be a great fit to play the character.