At the very least, he couldn't be any worse in that film than Dominic West was in his most significant onscreen appearance since the series' conclusion, as Jigsaw in last winter's "Punisher: War Zone." West was totally unrecognizable beneath the character's facial prosthetic, which is probably just how he wants it; no one would like to be remembered for this uniformly bad performance, which includes maybe the worst Italian accent every committed to celluloid (Scream "I WANNA LOI YUH!" as you do a bad De Niro impression and you'll begin to get the idea).

West is so good on "The Wire" and so bad in "Punisher: War Zone" you want to make excuses for him -- did he think the movie was a comedy? Was his work radically altered in the editing room? Had he just undergone major surgery and delivered his performance under the influence of perception-altering pain medication? Jigsaw may want a "loi-yuh," but it’s West who should seek better representation. As Baltimore PD's moralistic rule breaker Jimmy McNulty, he proved himself capable of holding our attention at the center of a massive, charismatic ensemble with humor and grit and gravitas. He deserves a lot better than slumming it -- slumming it badly, I might add -- through this "War Zone." Where West goes from here remains to be seen, but the actor himself doesn't seem terribly optimistic about his opportunities in America. When the fifth season of "The Wire" premiered in the U.K., West told The Guardian, "My plan remains what it has always been: to do whatever comes up that seems interesting. Trouble is, there's very little interesting stuff that comes up."

It's a dilemma that's plagued plenty of his co-stars. Idris Elba, a.k.a. brilliant drug kingpin Stringer Bell, has had a relatively robust post-show output (it doesn't hurt that he was written off after the third season and has had more time to find work), but little of it is worthy of comparison to his memorable turn as Bell. He's delivered a fun multi-episode guest spot on this season of "The Office" in a role that Elba told NPR was conceived as "a corporate version" of his "Wire" character, but in film roles he's mostly been relegated to playing the innocuous sidekick -- take "The Reaping," in which he plays a forgettable second fiddle to Hilary Swank's miracle debunker.

His most egregious miscasting so far came in last year's remake of "Prom Night," where he played Detective Winn, the cop assigned to keep Brittany Snow away from a deranged stalker. On "The Wire," Stringer was always two steps ahead of everyone around him; in "Prom Night," Winn is always two steps behind. With the knife-wielding serial murderer still on the loose, he decides to send Snow’s character Donna to her remote family home in the woods, where the killer will have lots of opportunities to strike at her again, instead of shipping her off to a police station where she'd be safe. If Stringer had been up against cops like Winn, his operation might never have gotten busted.

The only director who's found an appropriate vehicle for Elba's talents is Tyler Perry, who used the actor’s gift for understated smolder and his ability to play characters who are simultaneously aggressive and sensitive as the lead in his 2007 film "Daddy's Little Girls." Elba plays an ex-con mechanic struggling to regain custody of his three daughters from his shrewish ex-wife (Tasha Smith). His agreeably subdued take of the character goes a long way toward balancing out Perry's tendency toward overstatement and caricature, and the actor has good romantic chemistry with co-star Gabrielle Union and several moving scenes with the girls who play his daughters. The movie's a bit of a muddle -- and Perry's heavy-handed depiction of the neighborhood drug dealers pales in comparison to "The Wire" -- but Elba's performance is satisfyingly complete. We'll see how he fares in this week's release "Obsessed," in which he plays the Michael Douglas role in a new twist on the old "Fatal Attraction"-style stalker thriller alongside Beyoncé Knowles and Ali Larter.

The only actor who's really flourished after leaving "The Wire" is Amy Ryan, who played a major role in the series' second season and garnered a much-deserved Oscar nomination for her supporting work in the crime thriller "Gone Baby Gone" (based, coincidentally, on a novel by Lehane). Ryan plays two very different single mothers: "The Wire"'s Beatrice “Beadie” Russell is a hard-working Port Authority security guard who discovers a grisly murder; "Gone Baby Gone"'s Helene McCready is an unemployed alcoholic half-heartedly looking for her missing daughter (Michael K. Williams also appears in a brief role as a police officer). Helene is an absentee mother and the character sort of vanishes from the movie at a certain point as well. But whenever Ryan is on the screen, she crackles with nefarious energy, and she does an impressive job of remaining both sympathetic and unlikable. Smart, dark, and cynical, "Gone Baby Gone" is the rare crime story to come out of Hollywood in recent years with enough regional authenticity and ethical queasiness to rate with the show that allowed Ryan her breakthrough.


At times, "The Wire"'s story and cast swelled to such proportions that it began to resemble a more realistic (and more reasonable) version of the New York City of theater director Caden Cotard’s dreams that he built into a reality in Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York." In that film, Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, says "There are nearly 13 million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due." Simon and his collaborators managed to give even the smallest roles in his enormous cast their emotional due. Now that the show is over, actors like West, Elba, Williams, Ryan, Hector, and so many others like Clarke Peters, Andre Royo, Seth Gilliam, Sonja Sohn, Jim True-Frost all deserve their own shot at really being the leads in their own stories. But will anyone give them one? Great actors are nothing without great parts or filmmakers willing to take the creative chances necessary to create them.


[Additional photos: "The Wire," HBO, 2002-2008; Jamie Hector in "Max Payne," 20th Century Fox, 2008; Michael K. Williams in "The Road," Dimension Films, 2009; Idris Elba in "Prom Night," Columbia Pictures, 2008; Amy Ryan in "Gone Baby Gone," Miramax Films, 2007]