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The Best Paul Giamatti Movies, Ranked
Often typecast as a (lovable) curmudgeon, the Oscar nominee has a surprising range.
Revealing that he shows up in this movie kind of qualifies as a spoiler, given its last-man-on-earth premise; he’s basically a plot twist in human form, appearing with Charlotte Gainsbourg a full hour into the 99-minute run time to confront Peter Dinklage’s postapocalyptic survivor with a civilization thought lost and a chilling technological wrinkle. It’s frankly surprising Giamatti had a real dramatic career after the mean-spirited mugging of this very broad comedy — a supposedly family-friendly farce that hands him racist jokes and saddles him with a soul patch every bit as unflattering as the dyed-blue skin and orange hair his adolescent rival inflicts upon him. Giamatti might be at his best in a more subtle register, but there’s delicious fun in seeing him loudly chew the scenery, this time via the role of a mob fixer who exists in a state of constant sneering obscenity: feeling up corpses, delivering “my wife” jokes like some grotesque action-movie parody of a sitcom husband.
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