The Brendan Fraser renaissance is here, and no one can deny it. After a quiet exit from stardom over the last decade or so, Fraser is experiencing a career revival thanks to his acclaimed performance in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale. Fraser has been so utterly charming and emotionally open about his personal issues that the controversies surrounding the film are completely divorced from the appreciation fans have shown for him on a personal level. Regardless of the varying opinions on The Whale itself and the film’s depiction of obesity, it’s great to see the actor getting recognized for not just this role, but also his entire career. However, Fraser’s true comeback role isn’t the one that could land him an Oscar win this year -- it’s the one he made two years prior with Steven Soderbergh.

No Sudden Move debuted in 2021 on HBO Max and featured a star-studded cast in a thrilling period heist thriller. The film focuses on the criminals Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle) and Ronald Russo (Benicio del Toro), who discover that they’ve been set up in a complex mission gone awry. Fraser has a supporting role as Doug Jones, a gangster of some reputation who initially recruits Curt and Ronald for their job. Considering the film’s lack of a theatrical run and the breadth of its ensemble, Fraser’s performance hasn’t been talked about much, which is unfortunate.

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The Whale is the type of film that an actor wins an Oscar for; it’s a big, showy performance with a lot of makeup, a physical transformation, several tear-jerking speeches, and an emotional simplicity that is easy to reduce to a few clips that can be shown in a montage. However, Fraser’s No Sudden Move performance is much more impressive and proves why he’s such a great actor. How does someone that everyone seems to adore somehow transform into a vile, malicious character that manages to terrify his co-stars? Fraser’s skills as a character actor are often overlooked, but Doug proved he had a side that no one had ever seen before. No Sudden Move was the real start of “The Fraserssaince,” and it shouldn’t be overlooked.

Fraser Takes on One of His Most Intimidating Roles

One of Soderbergh’s greatest gifts as a filmmaker is his ability to assemble fantastic casts and allow each performer to do something different from their norm. Cheadle and del Toro have certainly played criminal pawns before, but in No Sudden Move they’re the most sympathetic characters in this complex network of double-crossing gangsters, assassins, and spies. Fraser is the type of actor who used to be the movie star at the center of the poster, but Soderbergh cleverly chooses to shield him in secrecy, with only vague references to the enigmatic “recruiter” who has set this plot into motion. It heightens the tension as Jones gives his two top agents their first mission: intimidating the GM accountant Matt Wertz (David Harbour) by holding his family hostage.

Soderbergh is a filmmaker who excels in the minutiae, and the period-accurate details help make Fraser’s first scene even more intimidating. The dark, secluded atmosphere surrounding Jones gives him an omnipresence that’s nearly Orwellian; it’s as if both Goynes and Russo know that any misdeed on their part will immediately make its way back to Jones. The knowledge that Jones seems to be always aware of what’s going on haunts Goynes and Russo during the initial seizure, which inevitably goes awry when they’re forced to kill their trigger-happy companion Charley (Kiernan Culkin). The realization almost immediately sets in; Fraser doesn’t even have to appear on-screen to cast a looming shadow.

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The ethics of the situation are immediately thrown into question once Jones discovers that Wertz’s documents are disingenuous, and that he should immediately be taken out. Fraser’s stern, unemotive commands to Goynes don’t make time for the sort of “ethical debates” that a less-experienced criminal would have. In addition to the weaselly accountant, Jones also wants Russo dead. Fraser’s intensity helps make the stakes even higher for Goynes, even though his interactions with the other characters have been minimal.

Fraser Shines in 'No Sudden Move's Stacked Cast

2022 also marked the passing of the late great Ray Liotta, another underrated character actor like Fraser who continued to do interesting work after his famous roles in classics like Something Wild and Goodfellas. His character Frank Capelli, another veteran mob leader, is paired alongside Fraser, so you have one actor already known as a staple of the gangster genre standing right next to someone known for his more endearing roles. It speaks to Fraser’s transformative qualities that the pairing doesn’t feel ironic in the slightest. Capelli and Jones appear to be on the exact same wavelength, and their similar intent on dispensing with Goynes and Russo once and for all.

It’s at this point in the narrative that a viewer might be expecting a greater explanation as to what Capelli and Jones’ plan is and why Goynes has been set up, but that’s not the way that Soderbergh’s mind works. He places interesting characters in front of the audience, then lets them depart just as soon as they’ve landed an impact. During a brutal gun brawl lifted straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, Jones is promptly killed. Fraser was able to show that even though Jones was a man of influence, he still lives and dies within the brutal system that made his name. There’s no nostalgia in the criminal world, and Soderbergh doesn’t indulge our nostalgia for Fraser by giving him a more optimistic fate.

Fraser will most certainly be landing more leading roles in the wake of the success of The Whale, and it will be great to see him returning to the center of the screen for the first time in over a decade. However, this should not disguise the fact that he’s also a terrific character actor who can improve a film even if it’s only a brief appearance. Given that he’s mostly associated with family-friendly films, wacky comedies, and action franchises, Fraser could have stuck out like a sore thumb in No Sudden Move. Instead, he’s gives what may be the film's best performance. In a movie that also stars del Toro, Cheadle, Liotta, Culkin, Harbour, Jon Hamm, Matt Damon, and Bill Duke, that’s no small compliment.