Harrison Ford is not very good in it—perhaps not a great actor generally. His pretending to be a nerd/fan in Zhora's dressing room is too cringey to watch it's so bad… I feel like I'm watching Mickey Rooney playing Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
And the actor that played Leon (Brion James) is also difficult to watch (he was a distraction in The Fifth Element as well).
My only complaints though.
Harrison Ford is playing Rock Deckard, a detective (not an actor) who hunts down artificial humans. At least to begin with, he and his fellow detectives don't have much respect for the replicants, so he thinks it will be easy to manipulate Zhora and get some information out of her before he kills her.
He's not pretending to be a nerd/fan. He's pretending to be a spineless small-time bureucrat doing an inspection that nervous with her.
I agree about Harrison Ford, though I don't know who would've done it better at that moment in history.
aside : The Fifth Element is considered to be one of the noisiest distracting sci-fi movies ever, so to hear your main distraction was Brion James made me grin.
Huh? Between Kassovitz trying to rob Corbin, the priest's sidekick, the head scientist, the archeologist with "Aziz, light!", the Chris Rock character, Corbins "fake wife" suggestion, the space port ticket counter gags, the president, and several others, the movie hardly has "few" slapstick outlets.
Did we watch the same movie? The opera singer was the ONLY character that wasn't slapstick...
Wow, couldn't disagree more. I mean, Brion James wasn't a good actor, but he aced his role of Leon. Leon is weird, awkward and insecure, while also capable of great violence... which fit Brion perfectly.
I don't remember him playing a heavy in The King is Alive, which is not a classic but a rather dark Dogme 95 film, of all things.