Can Richard Grieco Act? Part 2b

Since I started the great Quest to Figure Out Whether Richard Grieco Can Act, I've watched:

Mobsters (1991)
Tomcat: Dangerous Desires (1993)
It Was Him or Us (1995)
Against the Law (1997)
Captive (1998)
A Night at the Roxbury (1998)
Blackheart (1998)
The Apostate (2000)
Final Payback (2001)
Sexual Predator (2002)
Dead Easy (2004)

That's 11 movies spanning 13 years, in addition to 21 Jump Street and Booker, so you'd think it would be enough to draw some conclusions from.  And mostly, I think that my conclusion is akin to what a reader said in a comment recently--he's not a bad actor, but he's not "masterclass", either. In a lot of Grieco's movies, I don't notice his acting one way or the other, and I think that's how most movies are.  On rare occasion, someone will be so good that it will jump out at you; more often, if you notice the acting it's because it's awful and takes you out of the story.  For the most part, I think if an actor is doing his job, his acting isn't making an impression on you--you're thinking about the story.  That's how most of Grieco's performances have been for me so far.

But here's why, after a couple of seasons of television and 11 movies, I'm not quite ready to commit.  First, some of these movies were bad.  And some of them just didn't seem like good vehicles from which to judge.  Here's a quick rundown:

In Mobsters, I thought Grieco was pretty good and he got decent reviews, but his part was relatively small. Tomcat: Dangerous Desires was (no exaggeration) one of the worst movies I've ever seen from a writing, direction, acting and production standpoint.  That Grieco was considerably better than his co-stars wasn't enough to bring the performance up to "good."

I've already talked at some length about It Was Him or Us, in which I found Grieco quite convincing.  Against the Law was a weird movie and, again,  not otherwise staffed with a lot of talent.  From there, we hit a good streak:  I thought Captive, Blackheart, The Apostate and Final Payback and Dead Easy were all decent. They're all movies I would probably have watched if I weren't studying Richard Grieco, and probably would have come away saying, "That wasn't bad."  I skipped over A Night at the Roxbury because Grieco was playing himself, and although he created a stylized version of himself for the film, it wasn't entirely acting. 

I skipped over Sexual Predator because, frankly, I don't quite know what to do with it.  I saw a lot more people having sex--many of them not especially attractive--than I wanted to.  And the story was definitely edgy.  But it had that "down the rabbit hole" feel where someone makes one bad decision after another and things slide out of control, but you can kind of understand it. And Grieco was convincingly both seductive and enigmatic--no clear good guy or bad guy here.

But the primary reason that I'm undecided isn't any of that, and it isn't that there's so much I haven't seen.  It's a couple of episodes of old television shows.

A review I read suggested that The Apostate might have been the best performance of Grieco's career, but I don't think so. Though it defies reason, I think the best performances of Grieco's career may have come during 21 Jump Street and Booker.  Each of those series features a single episode in which Dennis Booker is, for lack of a better description, mentally disintegrating.  And in each of those episodes, Grieco's transformation is jarring and dramatic.

Had I watched those television shows in the 80s, those two episodes would have left me expecting great things from Grieco; even though I haven't seen that level of performance in any of the films I've picked and chosen, they gave me a different perspective on what he might be capable of.  So even at this point, I'm reserving judgment a bit, waiting to see whether a later role comes along that rivals those performances.