Looking back on Charlie Sheen’s greatest

Once upon a time, Charlie Sheen was not a Internet meme, but an actual real live actor with a promising career.

Call us nostalgic, but here’s a list of our favorite Sheen films that will make you yearn for the days of his winning roles, not “bi-winning.”

Ferris Bueller’s Day off (1986)

Yep, read it again – the Sheenster was in the classic John Hughes about a mischievious truant high school student who brings his best friend and girlfriend into his day of hijinks. It’s a small part, but Sheen manages to be memorable as “Boy in Police Station.”

Wall Street (1987)

If you haven’t seen this iconic ‘80s film that preaches that “Greed is good,” get on it. Sheen plays the impressionable Bud to Michael Douglas’s delightfully heartless Gordon Gekko.

His performance balances ingenuity and ambition and still grips viewers despite its dated touches. Airline stock – profitable? Scoff if you will, but the movie’s message of the dangers of greed – and Sheen’s gripping acting – passes the test of time.

Young Guns (1988)

This movie’s poster simply read: “SIX REASONS WHY THE WEST WAS WILD” and listed the eight actors that studded middle budget 1980s movies: Emilio Estevez, Keifer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Phillips, Dermot Mulroney, Casey Siemaszko and, of course, Charlie Sheen.

Combine prime 1980s man meat and the wild west, and you’ve got a very comic guilty pleasure film.

The Rookie (1990)

Sheen flexed his action muscles in this Clint Eastwood cheesefest which told the story of a veteran cop (a grimy Eastwood), his green partner (a nearly two-dimensional Sheen) and their chase to pin a bad guy. It’s a bad movie, sure, but the stuff of perfect mid-afternoon television.