A quick word about Dave Bautista
The former wrestler has carved out a niche for himself at the movies.
There are different kinds of actors: the Oscar-gimme kind, the action variety, and a comedy star. Dave Bautista does the last two things really well, and shouldn’t have a care about the awards. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger and The Rock, he has charisma, humor, and a commanding presence to get the message across that he can carry a movie without much to it (“My Spy” for example.)
Unlike those two actors and more like Sylvester Stallone, Bautista can actually act dramatically in a role that doesn’t require boatloads of laughs or bullets. Take 2017’s “Blade Runner: 2049” for example. He had a very small role in the critically acclaimed (and quite awesome) movie, coming in a scene at the very beginning of the film.
Ryan Gosling’s Officer K, aka a Blade Runner, is in charge of tracking down the old replicants from the older eras before the cyborg corporation changed hands to Wallace (Jared Leto, underused in this movie). Bautista’s Sapper Morton is one of the older cyborgs who got out of the city and made a life, but in the movies you don’t escape the sins of the past, or Gosling.
They fight, and it’s one of the most visceral (and quick) one-on-ones in recent cinematic memory. Bautista literally clears a thick wall using Gosling’s head, but the latter and younger Agent K gets the best of the big guy in the end. In the aftermath of the fight, Bautista puts every ounce of feeling into the line, “you’ve never seen a miracle.”
The line meaning that he raised a kid that Harrison Ford’s Richard Decker from the 1982 original had with Sean Young’s Rachel: a baby from a human and a cyborg. Sapper chides Officer K about never being able to see something so miraculous. And it’s not like we don’t realize it’s Bautista from “The Guardians of the Galaxy,” but we can believe in our head that he is Sapper Morton.
That’s all you need in a movie performance. Convince me you could walk a mile in those shoes, and then make it look more invisible with each scene. The rest is taking the script and carving something out of words. Bautista has done that in “Dune: Part One” and the upcoming M. Night Shyamalan’s “Knock at the Cabin,” in addition to “Blade Runner: 2049.”
He’s not better than The Rock. What does that even mean? Neither guy finishes their career with a trophy, so why not make a place for both of them and declare them different and successful? Bautista has stretched his talents for good reasons because he doesn’t put himself all over the map like a soda brand like Dwayne Johnson does. He wants to be an actor, and take challenges. Johnson doesn’t do that, nor is he interested in doing so. Bautista is and it shows!
When it comes to blowing me away, Bautista has done that without even having billing in the top five slots. That’s talent.