Five Great Tom Sizemore Moments

The first emotion I experienced when I heard the news that Tom Sizemore had died was shock. Shock that he had died, yes, but also shock at how young he was. In my mind Tom Sizemore came out of the womb playing 40-year-old men. But at 61, he was a contemporary of many of the actors who were playing teenagers when I was a teenager. John Hughes favorites like Judd Nelson (63), Emilio Estevez (60), Ally Sheedy (60), Matthew Broderick (60), and Molly Ringwald (55). Nothing like that kind of realization to jolt you with a bolt of pure panic about your own mortality.

The second thing that happened was the realization that I was a bigger fan of Sizemore’s work than I’d realized. I don’t know much about acting (writers are my expertise) but I know what I like. As an actor, it seems to me that Sizemore had a manic Steve McQueen-like ability to fill up his performances with a million little details that made his characters seem more real than they otherwise would have. As I thought about his performances, of all the movies I’ve loved him in, several singular moments jumped out at me…

1. POINT BREAK - I’ll start with the moment I referenced in a Saturday morning tweet after I first heard the news that Tom had passed. In POINT BREAK, Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves) and Angelo Pappas (Gary Busey) lead an FBI raid on a drug house where they suspect that the bank robbers they’ve been pursuing are hiding out. What they don’t know is that inside the house is an undercover DEA agent, played by Sizemore, who is not too happy that his undercover operation has been blown.

   I love the line “all I wanna know, smart guy, OK? All I wanna know…” I suspect that the line as written in the script did not call for him to repeat the phrase “all I wanna know” twice, but that’s what Sizemore did, because that’s how real people talk. I also love the way he pulls at his crazy junkie hair and slams the crystal meth against the wall. You want to know if that was something Kathryn Bigelow told him to do, or if it was just something he did on his own. He only had that one scene to make DEA Agent Dietz come alive and he used his entire body to do it. And that’s the thing you notice about Sizemore, the more you watch him. I have an almost photographic memory for movies, even movies I’ve only seen once, and a lot of the moments I’ve listed here are things I could see in my head but which were hard to find in film clips because they weren’t lines of dialogue, they were just… motion.

2. BLACK HAWK DOWN - I’m going to pull a couple moments from this movie because it’s my favorite of Sizemore’s performance. Others will probably say I’m crazy, that his finest performance has to be HEAT, but Sizemore spent his career creating characters who defined cool under pressure and he never did it better, in my opinion, than he did it in BLACK HAWK DOWN. The first moment I want to highlight occurs at 2:00 in this collection of Sizemore’s best moments from the movie. As bullets rain down on Colonel McKnight’s retreating, and hopelessly lost HUMVEE, the camera cuts to Sizemore as he silently mouths “motherfucker motherfucker” over-and-over. Talk about making an impact while saying absolutely nothing.

   The second moment happens at 3:15. Having been ordered to turn his HUMVEE around and drive back through the shooting gallery his driver Lt. Maddox says “they’re going to get us all fucking killed, sir”, and McKnight cooly responds “well, let’s get it over with.”

   Also, you wonder if Sizemore might have been channeling Robert Duvall’s Colonel Kilgore in some of these scenes, the way he doesn’t flinch from incoming fire while all of his men dive for cover. Great stuff!

3. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN - My favorite Sizemore moment begins at 4:35 in this long clip as the squad decides what to do with their captured German soldier. It’s a showdown between Sizemore’s Sergeant Horvarth and Ed Burn’s Private Reiben. Watch as Sizemore transforms himself through an entire gamut of emotions over the course of this confrontation. Notice the look his gives Tom Hanks before pursuing Reiben, who appears to be about to desert his unit. Listen to the way he says “Nah, I’m gonna shootcha cuz I don’t like ya.” He’s calm and cool and funny yes, but also scary and intimidating. And then as Reiben begins to frustrate him he begins to lose control of himself… “you don‘t know when to shuttup, you don’t know how to shuttup…” Man, the first time I saw this movie, I thought that 1911 was going to go off right there. And then as Tom Hanks steps in and begins to defuse the confrontation, watch as Sizemore’s hand veeeery sloooowly relaxes on the butt of his pistol.

   And then, finally, we have the helmet throwing scene. What I like about this is, again, Sizemore is using his whole body to create a character that behaves the way real people behave. He doesn’t swing the gun in his hand like a club, which is probably the most tactically sound thing to do. Rather, he’s enraged at the German he’s fighting with and not thinking straight. So, when that soldier throws his helmet at Sizemore, he grabs his own helmet and throws it right back at him like “oh yeah, well how do you like that!?” Later, he’s so angry at having been shot that rather than dive for cover he takes a couple seconds to curse out the advancing Germans before throwing his empty sidearm at them. Who knows what real combat is like? I certainly don’t, but this sequence feels chaotic and real to me because of the way Sizemore behaves. I believe that someone caught up in the terror and fog of war would behave in a completely irrational way, just like Sizemore does.

Anyway, here’s to Tom Sizemore… rest in peace, sir. There aren’t many left out there who can do what he did. He was a critical Alpha presence in a lot of the movies I’ve loved. An actor who knew how to play Men, with a capital “M”, something in desperately short supply these days.

His talents will be missed.

Let me know in the comments which Tom Sizemore moments are your favorite… and I’ll brace myself for a healthy dose of “you’re crazy for not including this awesome scene from HEAT.”