I guess i was in the minority but I thought Ang Lee’s Hulk was a great movie.
Also I must say that Ian McDiarmid’s performance as Palpatine/Darth Sidious in the Star Wars prequels was outstanding. In fact, I’d say his performance held the films together more than any of the other actors.
It’s so diffiucult to believe that Cage’s WICKER MAN was actually a labor of love.
I liked his first Ghost Rider- not yet seen 2.
Will Smith in the recent Aladdin film. Even without comparing him to Robin Williams’s Genie and the countless onstage Genie actors in the Broadway version, Smith’s performance just seemed flat and forced. It did seem like he was trying to make his own interpretation of the role, and there is nothing wrong with that. But it just left me not feeling excited while watching.
I liked it, too.
I’ll add my vote for George Clooney in “O Brother Where Art Thou”. I just felt bad for him acting his heart out next to pros like John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson.
So is BDSM.
The one that immediately, springs to mind is Dick Tracy (1990)
Warren Beatty poured everything he had into producing, directing, and starring in the film. He assembled a huge cast of stars of the time, including Madonna, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Kathy Bates, James Caan, et al…
Problem was… his acting was flat and overshadowed by some other performances. The story-line very weak.
I was not the huge blockbuster that Disney expected and any plans for a franchise of sequels were kiboshed. Beatty has ownership of the rights and has been in an ongoing battle to bring Dick Tracy back to film or television since.
I don’t see Clooney as putting his heart into it, though; shucks, I’d say Adam West put more effort into making the voices of Bruce Wayne and Batman sound different, and as far as I know West wasn’t actually trying.
The one I always think of is Gwyneth Paltrow in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It should have been the classic Girl Reporter™ role, fast-talking and spunky, but Paltrow played it as pensive and hesitant. I keep hearing that there aren’t enough strong female parts in movies; that was one that should have been and wasn’t.
If it had been made earlier, Paltrow’s mom would have knocked that role out of the park.
A lot of vanity projects end up this way, where the actor driving the film really shouldn’t have cast himself or herself in the role (Bill Murray in The Razor’s Edge comes to mind). Thank God someone talked Madonna out of playing Frida Kahlo.
Oh. I was precisely about to pick DiCaprio in The Aviator as an example for the OP. He tries very hard, but to me doesn’t pull Hughes at all.
Tim Robbins in the Hudsucker Proxy. Robbins can hold his own in Bull Durham with Kevin Costner and he’s fine, but put him in a scene with Paul Newman and he just can’t keep up.
John Travolta in Hairspray. Hell, the man in any musical. He’s a mediocre singer and he cannot dance. In Grease, Jeff Conway upstaged him every time.
How does this man even get work?
The Scientology mafia?
I could easily be persuaded that Mac and Me was made with MST3K in mind.
We agree to disagree. I think Scorsese cast DiCaprio precisely because he wanted to shatter people’s image of Hughes as an insane drag-addicted old man. In the 30s and 40s, Hughes was like a movie star and Scorsese’s goal was to remind people of that.
After watching Gotti, there is NO WAY he gets a leading role in a major film, again, with the exception of Battlefield Earth 2, should that ever get made.
eta: apparently I was wrong, he just was a co-lead with Morgan Freeman (!) in something called The Poison Rose, released in May, budget not mentioned
Hunh? He’s just doing character work. One of the few times up til then he had done so.
He was fine. Neither Turtutto or Nelson in that film are doing much more than Clooney.
Travolta isn’t that bad an actor (or, in his younger years, a singer) - he was perfect in Saturday Night Fever. However, his style of acting and singing went out of fashion in the 1980s and we have Tarantino to thank/blame for the return of Travolta as a leading actor (plus, possibly, the Scientology mafia). I don’t hate him but I don’t find him particularly interesting to watch either.
And I don’t get the hate for Clooney in “O Brother” - he was playing as much a comic character as everyone else in the film. And at least we didn’t have to hear him sing (Pierce Brosnan in Mamma Mia, I’m looking at you).
Yeah, Travolta was okay when he was the only one dancing, like in Grease and Saturday Night Fever. But anyone who danced with him clearly upstaged him.
I pointed this out to someone who was hooked on Greased–in Greased Lightning, he gets so upstaged by Jeff Conway (who, IMHO, should have had the lead). She never watched the movie again.