Oscar Host Neil Patrick Harris's Best Movie Role: A Charming Fascist in 'Starship Troopers'
Although he’s had highly-praised hosting stints at the Tonys and the Emmys, Neil Patrick Harris might’ve been a surprising pick to emcee the 87th Academy Awards this Sunday. After all, while the 41-year-old actor has a thriving stage and television career, his big-screen credits are a little light. He’s best known for playing himself — brilliantly, mind you — in three marijuana-laced Harold & Kumar adventures. Still, the How I Met Your Mother star does have one legitimately great performance captured on film, and no, it’s not playing second fiddle to The Smurfs or his recent creepy turn in Gone Girl. The role in question is Carl Jenkins from Paul Verhoeven’s subversive 1997 sci-fi masterwork, Starship Troopers.
Filmed four years after Doogie Howser, M.D. went off the air when Harris was a mere 24-years old, Troopers takes full advantage of his youthful charm, showing how it eventually curdles into cynicism and cruelty through his involvement in a propaganda-driven war. At the start of the film, Carl is a high school graduate who enlists in the Federation army alongside his buddies Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) and Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards) to combat an Earth-threatening alien menace, the Arachnids. While Carmen ends up piloting spaceships and Rico is thrown in with the infantry grunts, Carl is assigned to the military’s intelligence arm and quickly rises through its ranks. By the end of Troopers, he’s a full-fledged colonel behind one of the army’s biggest initiatives: capturing a live “brain bug” to experiment on and torture.
Related: Michael Ironside Looks Back on ‘Starship Troopers’
The brilliance of Harris’s performance is that he so clearly understands the razor-sharp satirical edge that Verhoeven is bringing to the source material, Robert A. Heinlein’s distinctly pro-military 1959 novel. You can’t necessarily say the same thing about his co-stars, Van Dien and Richards, both of whom have clearly been cast for their absurdly good looks, which makes them ideal poster children for aspiring soldiers. (Their slightly wooden line readings also complement the two-dimensional characterizations that Verhoeven is after.) Carl, on the other hand, is smart enough to recognize that the real power is wielded by the men who are smart enough to avoid the bloody alien battlefields. This clip below represents the closest he allows himself to get to the action: firing upon a captured “bug” point blank while it’s locked inside a jail cell, then turning to an observing camera to deliver helpful hints like “Aim for the nerve stem, and put it down for good.”
Verhoeven drives home the implications of Carl’s casual sadism by dressing Harris in a uniform that deliberately recalls the duds sported by Nazi officers during World War II. (The allusion had personal resonance for the director, having grown up in the German-occupied Netherlands — an experience he also drew upon for his 2006 film, Black Book.) You can practically hear Verhoeven chortling from off-camera when Harris strides into the frame looking more like Joseph Goebbels than Doogie Howser, and the actor slyly plays the moment for maximum shock and awe. Even then he had a confident and self-aware sense of humor, so we imagine he’ll have no problem with picky Oscar-night audiences.
Starship Troopers is available to stream on Amazon Instant, Google Play, iTunes, Netflix, YouTube and Vudu
Image credit: Everett
