Timothy Olyphant Is A Badass

The fat lady has yet to sing on Timothy Olyphant's career, but it's looking more and more like this will go down as his signature role. It's easy to see why. 

Raylan Givens is quite a character. He's cool, soft-spoken and intelligent. And yet behind his eyes, we see a man searching desperately for an excuse to shoot nearly everyone he comes across in the face. Givens makes good use of Olyphant's moral ambiguity. Plus, he shoots a good amount of people in the face.

As Timothy Olyphant cowboys go, Seth Bullock isn't nearly as smooth an operator as Raylan Givens. While certainly no dummy, he comes off far more as a force of blunt, just barely controlled fury. This is seriously one of the angriest characters of all time, and easily one of the most badass.

No one could play Bullock like Olyphant does, either. The way his seething eyes bug-out when he realizes he can't kill someone isn't in any script. That's 100% Olyphant. It follows reason that anyone we're prepared to call a badass should scare the Hell out of us, and this one of the last guys on earth we'd want to anger.

Let's be honest. Live Free or Die Hard is a subpar Die Hard movie. Set that issue aside, however, and you'll find a surprisingly decent action film. Seriously, the Maggie Q fight is awesome.

Olyphant plays Thomas Gabriel, a super hacker who takes the entire nation hostage along with John McClane's daughter. Obviously, he never had much chance of winning, and there's no way McClane's not going to kill him, so we know who the alpha badass is in this case. Nevertheless, Olyphant holds his own in the few scenes he shares with Bruce Willis.

One thing you wouldn't expect to find within Timothy Olyphant's wheelhouse is 1980s hair metal, but that's exactly why it's always dangerous to underestimate a badass.

Rockstar may be Mark Wahlberg's film, but Timothy Olyphant steals his scenes as a kind of crappy (but badass) guitar player. You don't need your Nigel Tufnel stand-in to look like he hates everyone around him, but it certainly helps. The only sour note in this film is the lame grunge rock coda, but we doubt that was Timothy Olyphant's idea. In fact, he probably hated that idea and wanted to beat up whoever came up with it.