RIP Burt Reynolds: They don't make them like the Bandit anymore

Hollywood superstar Burt Reynolds, who died today at age 82, was one of my first big cinematic heroes as a kid.

I can't really intellectualize why -- I was probably drawn in my by his famous mutaschacioed grin on the old VHS boxes, and his brand of good ole boy humor was vastly appealing to a youngster who was prohibited from venturing past PG-13 territory.

Sure, the blooperific The Cannonball Run wasn't high art or even coherent storytelling, but for little Adam it was pure fun, and the copious amounts of car crashes and cleavage certainly didn't disinterest me either.

I later came to appreciate Burt Reynolds more as an actor and a cultural icon when I discovered his breakthrough role in the 1972 film Deliverance, where he delivered an Oscar worthy performance as a kind of idealized masculine male who is brought down to earth by circumstances beyond his control. It's a powerful, riveting role that suggested a very different career path for Reynolds, who quickly cashed in on his burgeoning sex symbol persona with a succession of star-making roles.

It's hard to convey just wha an enormous star Reynolds became in the 1970s into the early 1980s. No one before or since has had such a consistent streak of popularity, at one point ranking number one with exhibitors for five years in a row.

And while some of the movies he churned out were trash (and he frequently admitted this), there are plenty of gems like The Longest Yard, White Lightning, Hooper, Starting Over, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Sharky's Machine and probably his most beloved film: Smokey and the Bandit.

This improbable blockbuster is such a remarkable time capsule of the era in which it was released -- the free wheeling, almost improvised spirit of it, the music, the goofy anarchic charm -- I got to see it recently and just had a ball even if it felt like something from a totally different universe from the one we're living in now.

He brilliantly paid homage and tweaked his '70s persona later with his most acclaimed role as porn film director Jack Horner in Boogie Nights. Reynolds is the anchor that grounds that incredibly stylish ensemble movie in reality, and I believe he was robbed of a richly deserved Academy Award for his performance in it.

I also recently caught what was likely yet another attempt at that elusive Oscar, a bit of a vanity project swan song called The Last Movie Star, in which Reynolds plays an aging facsimile of himself, an over-the-hill action movie veteran who is haunted by lost loves and lost roles.

The real life Reynolds often lamented the failure of his longterm relationship with actress Sally Field and roles he passed on that became career-defining turns for the likes of Jack Nicholson (Terms of Endearment, One Flew Over the Cuckoo'e Nest) and Bruce Willis (Die Hard).

The Last Movie Star wasn't really the great last role Reynolds wanted it to be -- he's fine in the movie -- but the film itself is a bit of a maudlin mess. But his posthumous part in Quentin Tarantino's highly anticipated Charles Manson adjacent film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood may just be the fitting finale he deserves.

Either way, his legendary status as one of the movies' all-time coolest, most charming tough guys is firmly established and I for one will miss his grin forever.