In my opinion, Russell Crowe is at his best playing morally complicated figures as prone to darkness as they are helping people. When he's playing a straightforward biopic protagonist in something like
A Beautiful Mind, I just can't buy him. Even his lead performance as the action hero in
Gladiator doesn't quite work for me
. But put Crowe in
Noah, The Nice Guys or the 2009 movie
State of Play, suddenly we're cooking with gas. Crowe's genuinely gifted at portraying rough and tumble figures who seem to have leaped out of reality rather than a studio executive's cliche-ridden idea of what a "tough guy" is. There's actual menace and unpredictability to his best performances and he's even able to imbue a distinctly different personality to, say, his version of Noah compared to his
Nice Guys role.
