Justin Bartha is a likeable ensemble actor with reliable comic timing. We value him as a straight man, though Gigli shows how badly a supporting performance can suffer when the writing turns crude.
Fi1m perspective
Brian in Gigli (2003) is asked to bear an awkward amount of the film’s comedy and tenderness. Justin Bartha plays him in a kidnapping story whose jokes about disability make its appeals for sympathy difficult to accept. We winced, because the humour encouraged us to laugh at the person the film wanted us to care about. Martin Brest gives his characters plenty to say about other people without showing much understanding of them, and Bartha is left working with that failure.
We would be wary of treating Brian as a fair demonstration of what Bartha can do. There are capable actors and a few surviving comic moments in Gigli, but neither makes the writing around his character less crude. Nor should sympathy for an actor stranded in a bad part turn into praise for the performance: the attempted tenderness remains hard to accept. His work here needs a director who has thought more carefully about whom the audience is being invited to laugh at.
National Treasure (2004) gave him a more suitable job as Riley Poole, the tech-savvy, sarcastic supporting character who became his breakthrough. Bartha’s reliable timing and likeable, ordinary presence suit the straight man’s task of giving an ensemble someone comparatively sensible. The danger is that being useful in this way can become the whole job, with little space left for anything else. His return to Riley in 2007 and his role as Doug Billings across The Hangover trilogy (2009–2013) helped establish a career largely defined by supporting parts.
That is not all he has attempted. Holy Rollers (2010) took him into independent drama, while White Girl (2016) brought darker character work; television included Colin Morrello in The Good Fight (2017). Those parts are reason enough to resist reducing him to the dependable comic companion, though they do not by themselves settle what he does best. Start with National Treasure for the timing, and leave Gigli out of any introduction.
Biography
Justin Bartha is an American actor. He was born on 21 July 1978 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and studied filmmaking and theatre at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Bartha's early film roles include an uncredited part in 54 (1998) and the character Brian in Gigli (2003). He is known for playing Riley Poole in the National Treasure films (2004 and 2007) and Doug Billings in the Hangover trilogy (2009–2013). His other credits include Failure to Launch (2006), The Rebound (2009) and television appearances in The New Normal, The Good Fight, Atlanta and Godfather of Harlem.
