In my opinion, The Crying Game is a movie we just don’t talk about enough these days, and one of the truly great things about it is the performances. Forest Whitaker is in only about the first twenty minutes or so, and honestly he gives the second most powerful performance in the film. He didn’t get an Oscar nomination for it, because the Best Supporting Actor nomination went to the only one in the movie that’s better, but still. (At that, I’m still annoyed that it lost to Gene Hackman in Unforgiven, which is . . . fine.) Also, it may have been the first thing I saw him in, and if you’d told me he was in fact from Texas, I wouldn’t have believed you at first.

This means that, no, I had not yet seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High, much less his film debut of Tag: The Assassination Game. I might have seen Good Morning Vietnam by then, but I don’t think I connected the two. And in fact if I did, I might have assumed he was putting on an American accent for it. In the years since then, he’s done an incredible array of films, and the only one universally acknowledged to be bad is Battlefield Earth, which he has since said he regrets having done. Even Lee Daniels’ The Butler has more supporters.

What’s more, I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard Whitaker described as being the problem with a movie. Yes, all right, he got a Razzie nomination for Battlefield Earth, but I’m not sure anyone could make a success out of those lines. And Trevor Noah has bad things to say about his accent in Black Panther, but he doesn’t shame the performance itself. (And also Trevor Noah is understandably annoyed that movies keep being made set in Africa where enormous numbers of American black people are cast and he is not?) He’s always putting in full effort, and has at least once been described as the best part of a film.

That’s even before we get to The Last King of Scotland. As it happens, I don’t strictly think he’s the lead. I think he ranks with Sir Anthony Hopkins as actors who won leading Oscars for supporting performances. The movie is in the briefly popular genre of James McAvoy Watches Things Happen To People More Interesting Than His Character. But McAvoy’s Dr. Nicholas Garrigan cannot hope to carry the movie over the amazing and powerful performance Whitaker gives as the monster Idi Amin. (He literally started getting out of the role when the movie was over by taking a shower to wash Amin off himself.) You’d have to be really something else to take this movie away from him, and the fact is, no one in the world ever successfully upstaged the historical Idi Amin that I’m aware of.

Also, really, he’s underrated in Good Morning Vietnam. Because it’s so much a Robin Williams Movie, the quality supporting performances remain undiscussed much of the time. Whitaker as Edward Garlick is as upstaged by Williams as Cronauer as McAvoy would go on to be upstaged by Whitaker, and for several of the same reasons. (Obviously not because Cronauer was a monster, though!) One of the things I think is interesting about the movie, though, is that the characters who like Cronauer show signs of doing what real people do around genuinely funny and somewhat rebellious people—trying to be like them and not being very good at it. They don’t all become as funny as Cronauer, and sometimes, they’re trying too hard, but sometimes, they are also capable of a few really funny bits. It’s a charming performance, even if it’s nowhere near Whitaker’s best.

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