Top 10 Matt Damon movies
Matt Damon is, by all accounts, a great guy — funny, charitable, involved in humanitarian work, married to a civilian for 10 years running. He’s never been to rehab. You don't see him splashed all over TMZ. A real class act.
All that and he’s a really good actor.
Damon, 45, had the good fortune to win his first (and so far only) Oscar at the start of his career, but his star has been shining bright ever since. Here’s a look back at his 10 greatest film roles so far.
10. 'Behind the Candelabra' (2013)
Damon was, on paper, comically too old to play Scott Thorson, a bisexual man who entered into a relationship with flamboyant entertainer Liberace when he was 17. But he’s such a delight in Steven Soderbergh’s sparkly HBO biopic that you forget to care. Gradually, Damon’s character is transformed by money, drugs and fame from a hale and innocent child to a miserable addict; the inevitability doesn’t make it any less sad. The film may have aired on TV, but it was more than good enough to release in theaters. And it landed Damon an Emmy nomination. He didn’t win, but deserved to for flaunting that Brazilian tan line alone.
9. 'Saving Private Ryan' (1998)
Steven Spielberg has never been a more visceral filmmaker than when he attempted to capture the horror of combat in the intense depiction of the invasion of Normandy that opens this shattering film. We follow Army Rangers led by Capt. John H. Miller (Tom Hanks) through the battlefield and see what he sees — soldiers falling left and right, a man picking his severed arm off the ground — and hear what he hears — nothing, at one point, when a bomb explodes nearby. There's still nothing like it. And that's just the first half hour of a nearly three-hour film about sacrifice, in which Miller and his squad search for Pvt. First Class James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon), a paratrooper missing in action and the last-surviving brother of a family of servicemen who fought in World War II.
8. The Jason Bourne series (2002-07)
Matt Damon has starred in four films in this quintet of thrillers: “The Bourne Identity” (2002), “The Bourne Supremacy” (2004), “The Bourne Ultimatum” (2007) and “Jason Bourne” (2016). Based on the books of Robert Ludlum, the Bourne series has proved to be reliably mature entertainment for adult moviegoers who want their action flicks to have a bit of brains. Damon plays Bourne, a former CIA assassin suffering from amnesia who gets roped into a series of pulse-pounding conspiracies over the course of the physically demanding, stunt-filled films. Who needs Tom Cruise?
7. 'Ocean’s Eleven' (2001)
It takes moxie to remake a movie made famous by the Rat Pack in their prime – that’s an awful lot of cool to contend with. But George Clooney has never lacked in moxie, and this modern ensemble cast rises admirably to the task under the slick, sexy direction of Steven Soderbergh. The stakes are higher, the heist bigger, the dangers greater as ex-con and estranged husband Danny Ocean plots to rip off three of the biggest casinos on the Las Vegas strip. Helping him out is Linus Caldwell, a naïve pickpocket with potential, and Damon's fresh face and youthful charm sell him as the best of the bad guys.
6. 'The Departed' (2006)
The original 2002 Hong Kong crime-thriller “Infernal Affairs” didn’t need an American remake; it’s plenty good as it is. But Martin Scorsese infused the story with dark wit and Boston-Irish flair for a manic, hyper-violent and darkly funny romp with the mafia. About to graduate police academy, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Billy Costigan is tapped to go undercover; after a stint in prison, he infiltrates the organization of an Irish-American mobster. Going undercover for the other side is Colin Sullivan (Damon), groomed by the same mob to infiltrate the police and sabotage any investigations into its criminal activities. Costigan and Sullivan circle each other in the shadows, ratcheting up the tension to an explosive conclusion.
5. 'True Grit' (2010)
Joel and Ethan Coen directed this second film adaptation of the 1968 novel of the same name. It’s possible you’ve seen the first adaptation, a quaint little 1969 picture starring John Wayne? You’d have to be a fool to take on the role of Rooster Cogburn, that grizzled, drunken, one-eyed U.S. marshal who netted Wayne his only acting Oscar. That or you’d have to be as awesome as Jeff Bridges, who makes the character so entirely his own that you forget to compare him to Wayne. Equally awesome is Damon, who blessedly erases all memory of Glen Campbell’s laughably bad LaBoeuf with his riotous turn as the good-hearted Texas ranger.
4. 'The Informant!' (2009)
Want more proof that Damon plays a great liar? Look to Steven Soderbergh’s twisty little film about Mark Whitacre, a whistleblower in the mid-’90s lysine-price-fixing conspiracy. Damon plays Whitacre with the perfect amount of aw-shucks charm to hoodwink the audience — and practically everyone in the film — into rooting for him, despite mounting evidence that he’s a nutbag. How could such a schlubby sack of doofus, with those cheesy ties and that high-school-chemistry-teacher mustache, be pulling one over on everyone? Just be glad Damon decided to become an actor instead of a con artist.
3. 'The Martian' (2015)
A good deal of the sci-fi survival film’s two-hour-plus running time is devoted to a lone astronaut abandoned on Mars, speaking his thoughts directly into the futuristic equivalent of a webcam. It could be subtitled “Just How Charming Is Matt Damon?” The answer: very. He may be running short on food, but biologist Mark Watney never runs short on charisma as he sciences his way out of certain death over the years it takes Earth to mount a rescue mission. No small feat, turning tales of extraterrestrial farming into a crowd-pleasing popcorn flick.
2. 'The Talented Mr. Ripley' (1999)
There’s something about Damon’s innocent, trustworthy, American-as-apple-pie-and-football face that makes it hard for his fellow characters, or the audience, to believe him capable of wrongdoing — which makes him the perfect actor to play deceitful characters. And he has played no character more deceitful than Tom Ripley, a poor washroom worker who gets confused for an old Ivy League chum of a shipping magnate’s son who’s living it up in Italy. Ripley rolls with the lie and jets to Italy to retrieve the prodigal son, morphing with each subsequent lie into a chilling monster in this intelligent thriller. It’s also an incredibly sexy film, set on the Italian Mediterranean and starring beautiful young people in vintage bathing suits, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett and Jude Law when he had all his hair.
1. 'Good Will Hunting' (1997)
Damon was only 27 when he and BFF Ben Affleck won writing Oscars for their career-making work on what would become a ’90s cultural touchstone. Gus Van Sant directed a baby-faced Damon in the role of Will Hunting, a 20-year-old South Boston genius with a photographic memory and a troubled past who’s slumming it as a janitor at MIT. He’s just the sort of stunted seedling that would flower if only someone would believe in him (and just the sort of dreamily maladjusted dude for whom smart ladies — in this case, a medical student played by Minnie Driver — seem to swoon). Damon has enough warmth and charisma to make even the biggest jerk sympathetic — and to make even the most populist melodrama feel fresh.
