I've only seen him in Fargo, but i think he's great in that..He has a strong presence.

the only reason that i can think of has to be his tone of voice and the way he talks and responds
yeah, you nailed it, but you could have paraphrased all that by saying "..has to be because he can't act for sh!t"

other than that, i think he is an above average actor.
If your average is Beyonce then sure. Otherwise, then he just sucks. He's not even his (mono)tone of voice, it's his facial expressions. He's just either wooden or overdoing it. No in-between.
The only reason he ever had regular work (thankfully it seems to be over) is he has baby blue eyes and that's enough for some girls to deserve an Oscar
For every lie I unlearn I learn something new - Ani Difranco

He's not telling children's fairy tales. He has a very direct & deadpan delivery, nothing more.

He reads his dialogue like he's reading a phone book.

he is a SPY, he is supposed to be cold and emotionless, he shouldn't flip or act normally, plus he saw many people die,

I've only seen him in Burn Notice but I'm going to look into his other work because I find him better and better with each episode - the man can also play a character within a character, a task a lot of other actors fail miserably with. I agree with your "above average" comment. I think he's quite good.
Proud to be a (movie-)nerd.

I think a lot of people (actors in particular) are jealous of him. So many actors get caught up playing the same character over and over; Jeff gets to create a new character almost every episode of Burn Notice. He gets to try out ever kind of accent, mannerism, and personality imaginable. Any actor would kill for such an opportunity.

I agree. I think he's a great actor. The fact that he can put on the different accents, tone of voice, and characters just shows his skills. Now, I'm not sure how his acting is outside of Burn Notice because I've never seen anything else that he's been in. I think his reaction to Nate's death was exactly how Michael Westen would have reacted. He cried and he was extremely upset, but his main reaction was anger. He hated Anson and Anson led to Nate's death. After Nate died, the only thing that Michael cared about was revenge, which is how it should have been.

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^Agreed.
I think perhaps it's narcissism. It's one thing to say 'I didn't care for this performance' - it's another thing entirely to simply bash people from the safety of our anonymous internet personas.

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(This is just me lazily copy+pasting pythoner's comment because I agree so heartily):
"It happens on every board for every actor, there are always hater, arm chair experts or people who are just giving their opinion. I found him to be a really compelling actor after watching Touching Evil. As much as I love burn notice, TE remains my favorite of his work."
BTW I was also ridiculously impressed by his performance in TE - glad I gave it a chance, I felt so protectively loyal about the original BBC series that I almost didn't. But he was grand.

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I think you hit the nail on the head with his tone and way he speaks. I tried watching this show but ultimately couldn't get by how much the way he spoke bothered me

It happens on every board for every actor, there are always hater, arm chair experts or people who are just giving their opinion. I found him to be a really compelling actor after watching Touching Evil. As much as I love burn notice, TE remains my favorite of his work.