Sizemore could be intense, charismatic, and manic in roles as soldiers, thugs, cops, killers, and, in a TV movie, baseball player Pete Rose. As a sergeant. Mike Horvath in Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (1998), he was the devoted second-in-command to Captain Miller (played by Tom Hanks) in a small group of Army Rangers whose mission after the invasion of the day I was to locate a soldier whose three brothers had already died in combat.
Near the end of the film, Horvath eloquently lays out the choices Miller faces: let Private Ryan stay and fight, which he prefers, or send him home, as the unit was ordered to do. .
“Part of me thinks the kid is right – what did he do to deserve this?” Sizemore, as Horvath says. “He wants to stay here? Alright, let’s leave him and let’s go home. But then another part of me thinks, what if by some miracle we stay, and we get out of here? Someday we could watch back and decide that saving Private Ryan was the only decent thing we got out of it.” “I thought so, sir,” he concluded. “As you said, Captain, we do this, we all deserve the right to go home.”
Spielberg wasn’t the only high-profile director Sizemore worked with. In Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers” (1994), he was an obsessed detective who pursued a young couple in a series of murders. In Michael Mann’s “Heat” (1995), he was part of a gang of robbers led by Robert De Niro. And in Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” (2002), based on a failed 1993 US military raid on Mogadishu, Somalia, to capture a brutal warlord’s lieutenants, he was the commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment. . When Sizemore starred in the television series “Robbery Homicide Division”, a police procedural set in Los Angeles and broadcast during the 2002-03 season, Robert Philpot of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram said he was the main reason to watch.
