Colin Farrell

Emanuel Levy of Variety felt the actor "shines as the subversive yet basically decent lad whose cynicism may be the only sane reaction to an insane situation." Michael Holden of The Guardian felt that he was "too much the hero" to fit the classic rebel archetype properly, but the film's shortcomings "don't lie with Farrell."

Farrell's next American films, American Outlaws (2001) and Hart's War (2002), were not commercially successful, but his 2003 films, including Phone Booth, S.W.A.T., and The Recruit, the latter his first starring role, were well-received as well as box office successes. Of Phone Booth, Ebert wrote that it is "Farrell's to win or lose, since he's onscreen most of the time, and he shows energy and intensity" while Philip French of The Observer simply says the actor "shines". In S.W.A.T., for which the actor starred with Samuel L. Jackson in an ensemble cast that also included Michelle Rodriguez, Olivier Martinez and Jeremy Renner, Alan Morrison of Empire wrote, "Farrell can usually be relied upon to bring a spark to the bonfire. That's also true of movie." Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times criticized Farrell's accent, writing that he "employed a wobbly American accent that makes him sound like an international criminal a step ahead of the authorities." And Ebert and the New York Timess A.O. Scott disagreed on the actor's effectiveness in The Recruit, the former noting that he was "extremely likable" whereas the latter wrote the actor "spends his time in a caffeinated frenzy, trying to maintain his leading-man sang-froid while registering panic, stress and confusion." Read Less

Farrell played the leading role of Captain John Smith, the founder of 17th century colonial Jamestown, Virginia who falls in love with a beautiful Native American princess, Pocahontas, played by Q'Orianka Kilcher. Director Terrence Malick, among other things, went out of his way to keep the two leads apart until it was time for them to be filmed together. Despite being released in only 811 theatres worldwide and having a relatively low box office gross, the film received a large number of positive reviews. Among the four alone from The Guardian, John Patterson described it as a "bottomless movie, almost unspeakably beautiful and formally harmonious." Read Less

The film focuses on a trio of employees who plot to murder their titular tyrannical supervisors. The London Observers Mark Kermode wrote that although the film would have benefited from a tighter script, both Jamie Foxx and Farrell were given "ripe" roles that they "riff with panache". Michael Phillips of the Los Angeles Times thought that Farrell brought "massive, slobby relish" to the role of the cocaine fiend boss.

Later that year, the actor played the main antagonist in the Fright Night remake. Farrell joined Anton Yelchin, David Tennant, and Toni Collette in this story about a charismatic vampire who moves in next to a high school student and his single mother. The film was released by Dreamworks, with Craig Gillespie (of Lars and the Real Girl) having directed from a script by cult favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer writer Marti Noxon. Sukhdev Sandhu of the Telegraph wrote that Farrell "proves his comedy credentials once more. utterly seductive as the plushly-eyebrowed carpenter-cum-bloodsucker" while the New York Timess A.O. Scott thought that Farrell played his role with "a wink and a snarl and a feline purr." Logan Hill, of New York magazine, opined that "Farrell's always either radiating smoldering menace or gawking like a crazy person, and often both" but concedes "Sure, it may not make much sense, but neither do centuries-old vampires living in Nevadan subdivisions. So he goes for it." Read Less