Scott Eastwood

In Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) he plays Nate Lambert, the pilot who stayed in the programme when John Boyega's Jake walked out of it, and whenever the two share a frame he is the one standing at attention. Jaw set, arms folded, voice level. The film asks him to be square-jawed and disapproving and he does exactly that, and Boyega gets the laughs. We kept waiting for him to do something we had not predicted, and by the end we had stopped waiting, which is partly the script's fault and partly the pattern of his career.

The face is his father's, and for his first small parts, in Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino (2008) and others, he worked under another name so that nobody could say the surname had got him in. The turn came with Fury (2014), David Ayer's tank film, in which he played Sergeant Miles; that is the performance people point to when they argue he can do more than glower. A romantic lead followed in The Longest Ride (2015), and then the franchises, one after another: Suicide Squad (2016), The Fate of the Furious (2017), Pacific Rim: Uprising, Wrath of Man (2021) and Fast X (2023). He has worked twice with Ayer and twice alongside Jason Statham, and Ayer is the director who has so far given him the most to do.

What he brings is real. He is cast as soldiers, policemen and special-forces men, he trains for the parts, and he holds the equipment as though he has held it before, which in a genre full of actors miming a rifle is worth something. What he does not bring, or is not asked to bring, is a second note. The common complaint is that in large ensembles he settles into one stern register and stays there, and on the evidence of Pacific Rim: Uprising we share it. In Fast X he returns as Little Nobody in a film that splits into three stories and finishes none of them, and he is in the one we cared about least; a week later we could not recall a line he said.

He has said of his tough-guy roles: "I try and bring a bit of vulnerability to each character. Even the alpha guy cries like a little schoolgirl sometimes." We would like to see that man. The blockbusters have no use for him, because they need someone to fold his arms while the funnier actor talks. A smaller film, a director with time, and a part that lets him look unsure would tell us whether there is more here than a good jaw and a clean salute. Until then he remains the most dependable man in the second row.