I was having a conversation with some friends and we were talking about a few ways to ruin a movie - bad plot, bad acting, bad pacing, etc., but we couldn’t come up with any movies in which the acting was decent, but the directing was awful. It always seemed that bad acting and bad directing went hand in hand.
I’m sure with the powers of the SDMB at my disposal, I can get some examples of movies in which the actors played their parts well, but the direction was terrible.
Caveats:
Uwe Boll. Nothing is good in his films.
Star Wars: Episodes II and III: Sure, Lucas directed, but we thought that it was the writing that sucked, not the directing.
No, the George Lucus sucks as a director too. Watch of the actors in other movies (Hayden Christiansan and Natalie Portman specifically), and you’ll see that they are indeed human beings capable of projecting emotions other than bland and too-stupid-to-live. It’s really quite amazing.
The Honeymoon Killers. Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco do their damndest, but the total lack of direction from Leonard Kastle pretty much hamstrings them.
I saw a play awhile ago that was like this: it was supposed to be absurdist, with horrific dialogue about a dead child being tossed lightly back and forth like a conversation about lawn care. However, the director had the actors do it straight, and so they emoted and struggled with the dialogue, treating it seriously. As a result, what should have been dark satire turned instead into leaden, implausible tragedy. It just didn’t work.
I recently watched Last Man Standing. The acting wasn’t great, nor was the script, but I really thought the director might be most at fault.
Michael Moriarty delivering a dead serious acting performance in the laughably bad Q](Q: The Winged Serpent (1982) - IMDb). I think he thought he was in a different movie.
Mystery Men had a dream cast, a good script and one of the worst directing debuts I’ve ever seen. The guy couldn’t even film a simple conversation without ballsing it up.
Lots of Dino de Laurentiis movies. He always amazes me with his ability to get great actors to sign on to lousy scripts.
Examples: Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, King Kong, Dune.
(I admit that Flash Gordon and Conan the Barbarian had bad lead actors, but their supporting casts were awsome.)
Batman Forever and Batman and Robin had good actors, who did the best they could with bad scripts badly directed.
It’s a quirky story that contains some quirky characters, and the performances are good–they really do feel like the people in the book.
But the director (I guess it’s the director) seemed to be worried that the people were too quirky, and did everything he could to take the fun out of it.