Not exactly the same definition of “worst role” but you have to acknowledge Kevin Costner in The Big Chill.
Wait, you say, weren’t Costner’s scenes cut completely out of that movie? Not completely. Remember the opening when the undertaker is preparing the corpse for the funeral, and he carefully covers up the slashed wrists? Those are Costner’s wrists.
I haven’t had the nerve to open my DVD of that but I still bet he is worse in The Wicker Man. He took the LB role after being persuaded by his brother, who is a minister.
Great voice, awful film- I just read his autobio a few months ago & he even makes positive comments about that P.O.S. in that it gave him the chance to show off his singing voice & to work with Alan Arkin.
I think Midnight Run was helped enormously by the fact that he was playing the straight guy in a “buddy action comedy.” If a serious actor, especially an intense/intimidating one, is going to try to veer into comedy, straight guy roles are where it’s at, because it allows him to more or less “be himself” in a comedic context.
What, no love for Joe Spinell’s most enthusiastically evil Count Zarth Arn? Cute Caroline Munro forced to work in a mine wearing a latex bikini and high heels wasn’t half bad either. How David Hasselhoff ever got to work again in the film industry after that movie debut is beyond be, however.
But here’s another one for your capitalistic approval: Shelley Winters, Henry Fonda and John Huston stayed conveniently in the US to sleepwalk through their parts in the incredibly boring italian stinker Tentacles. No idea how much they were paid, but I hope it was worth it.
Poor Boris Karloff made a handful of really bad, barely watchable mexican horror movies shortly before his death. Not that I thought less of him (I can only guess he needed the money after his expensive lung surgeries) but seeing this frail, obviously sick man clearly at death’s door being carted around in a wheelchair through that dreck made me cringe. Thankfully, they were released posthumously.
Forest Whitaker shoudn’t have been in Battlefied Earth. Nobody should, but especially not him.
Boris was no stranger to bad movies earlier in his career, either. There’s no other way to explain his playing the villain “Gruesome” in the poverty-row movie Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome, or his Mr. Wong movies, of The Ape. He made these while he was making his highly regarded Universal roles. You take your work where you can get it.
I don’t even think of it as a comic book movie. It had no more in common with the similarly-named comic book character than Starman or The Karate Kid.
Makes me think of a Moe quote on the Simpsons “I done things I ain’t proud of. And the things I am proud of are disgusting.”
John Houseman. Rollerball.
Or Stallone’s attempts at both comedy and singing in “Rhinestone” (1984)