Ron Howard started acting at 18 months old, was a TV regular by the age of 5, and a household name on The Andy Griffith Show before he hit puberty.
This sort of career path has led many a child star into ruin, but for Howard, all it did was give him a healthy respect for the business of Hollywood — and a desire to make a career behind the scenes. He leveraged his acting career to give him directorial opportunities — including working with Roger Corman, as much of an outsider as Howard was an insider — beginning in rough-hewn comedies and eventually hopping around genres like it was the easiest thing in the world.
It can be difficult to nail down what distinguishes a Ron Howard movie, other than his notorious competence and professionalism, but we might argue that the through line is good-heartedness: Even when his movies are dark, they express the fundamental view that the world is going to turn out okay. That works particularly well in an industry that always loves a happy ending, realistic or not. Howard and Hollywood have always been a perfect match … for better and for worse.
With the release of Solo: A Star Wars Story — which he came on mid-production after the original directors were fired — we’re looking at Howard’s 26 features as a director. This is as vast a selection of genres of movies as you can imagine, but they all still feel like his.
26. Angels & Demons (2009)
(Photo: Courtesy of Columbia Pictures)It can be difficult to keep the three Ron Howard–Tom Hanks adaptations of dull, meandering, needlessly complex novels straight, so as a shorthand: This is the worst one. Delayed by the Writers Guild strike, the movie is somehow both listless and restless, as if they were in a hurry to just get it over with already. The movie is essentially Tom Hanks sprinting through the Vatican yelling exposition at anyone within earshot. Howard and Hanks made one more of these, because at this point, why not?
25.The Dilemma (2011)
Howard had lost a little juice — he hadn’t had a non-Dan Brown hit in quite a few years — so he signed on for this buddy comedy starring Vince Vaughn as a man who discovers that the wife of his business partner and best friend (Kevin James, sure) is having an affair (with Channing Tatum, natch) and debates whether or not to tell him. That’s the whole movie, pretty much. This was the end of Vaughn’s little run as a box-office star, and he, along with everyone else, seems to be straining way too hard for the slightest laugh. Howard’s best comedies have a light, almost effortless touch, but this one is panting and gasping essentially from the opening frames.24. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
How do you screw up How the Grinch Stole Christmas? It’s easy, actually. You display only a surface understanding of what made Dr. Seuss so wonderful — conveniently waiting for him to die to rework his material, going against his wishes while alive — you flesh out less-interesting characters, you needlessly inflate the budget to add in a bunch of needless CGI junk, and you cast a movie star who knows he’s in the Hindenburg and just tries to mug his way through it. Jim Carrey salvages his dignity better than, say, Mike Myers did in The Cat in the Hat, but this thing shouldn’t have existed in the first place, a fact the film can never escape.23.In the Heart of the Sea (2015)
You can’t accuse Howard of being unambitious in his later years: At 61, he released a survival drama about a 1820s whaling expedition that went tragically wrong. Inspired by the same real-life events that prompted Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick, In the Heart of the Sea tells the story of Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), a veteran seaman who takes to the open water for adventure — only to find death, terror, and one gigantic whale. While the advertising made it sound like a Jaws-like roller-coaster ride, the film (despite some pretty thrilling action setpieces) is more of a meditation on mortality, destiny, and other weighty themes that Howard didn’t quite have the heft to pull off. It’s fun to watch Hemsworth step away from Thor to do some serious emoting, but we prefer his earlier Howard collaboration far more.(Excerpt) Read More at: Vulture.com
