Super Sizemore

Saluting a man who lived as he performed - intensely.

The news about Tom Sizemore is as sad as it isn’t entirely surprising. As someone who’s been writing about film since the mid-1990s, it was a long time ago that stories about the actor’s excesses had become like tales of Mickey Rourke’s eccentricity - frequent to the point of failing to register.

In amongst the arrests, the jail time and the drug and alcohol misuse, Thomas Edward Sizemore Jnr somehow carved out a body of work that was always interesting and often genuinely impressive. Terrific as an undercover cop in True Romance and utterly terrifying as a wired police officer in Natural Born Killers, he was arguably at his very best as Michael Cherrito, the family man/adrenaline-addicted thief in Michael Mann’s Heat. Being someone who was never slow to point out just how good they were, Sizemore liked to stress how many classic films he’d appeared in; a list which extended to Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out The Dead and Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days.

Sizemore was also vocal about the Golden Globe nomination he picked up for the 1999 TV drama Witness Protection and his Screen Actors Guild nod for ensemble work in Ryan. Further mainstream recognition eluded him on account of his coming off the rails and/or his falling off Hollywood’s radar. Indeed, look at the last decade of his working life and it consists almost exclusively of films you’ve probably never heard of which you have almost certainly never seen.

Such was the state of his career in the mid-noughties, Tom Sizemore found himself up for ‘Best New Stud’ in that year’s X-Rated Critics’ Organisation’s awards, the XRCOs. After that, leading roles in the likes of Vampfather (2022), Megalodon Rising (2021) and The Martyr Maker (2018) resembled quite the comeback. At least there was a guest role in Netflix’s Cobra Kai to cushion a blow made so much more severe by the fact that, when he was on top, Tom Sizemore had a tough guy swagger about him that brought to mind such great performers of yesteryear as Lawrence Tierney, Ralph Meeker and the young Robert Mitchum.

If it’s this Sizemore you’re interested in, I urge you to take in the Michigander’s work from the mid-1990s to the early noughties - the wraith-like Tom Rolls in Bringing Out The Dead, the despicable Dewitt Albright in Devil In A Blue Dress, Black Hawk Down’s matter-of-fact Lieutenant Colonel McKnight; heck, he even looked the business doing next to nothing as Bat Masterson in Lawrence Kasdan’s stolid Wyatt Earp. Whether as a bona fide American hero or a scum-sucking piece of slime, everything was within Tom Sizemore’s range.

And while it’s understandable that a lot of ‘tributes’ will focus on the appalling behaviour, the eons in rehab, and the straight-to-video hell that was his later career,
I prefer to remember that, while Tom Sizemore might have appeared in almost 200 movies, of the 20 of these that are actually worth watching, 10 truly are classics. And that they are classics has at least something to do with a certain thick-set bruiser from America’s Motor City.