Oh, and Crash. It wasn’t just the acting that saved Crash; I give credit to the director and director of photography, too. But that movie could have been unbelievably preachy, and it came across as only slightly so.
actually a great cast probably rescues a TV show more often than it does a movie. Would anyone have watched “The Wild Wild West” without the two lead actors?
Old School - it has the barest semblance of a plot, but who cares because you’ve got Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn in hilarious roles along with Luke Wilson, Sean William Scott, Jeremy Piven, and others in the supporting cast.
I’ll nominate I.Q., which was on HBO a couple of weeks ago. Walter Matthau as Albert Einstein with Lou Jacobi, Gene Saks and Joseph Maher as his brain trust, Stephen Fry as a pompous Brit, Tim Robbins and Meg Ryan as the romantic leads, as well as Charles Durning, Tony Shalhoub and Frank Whaley. I liked it a lot and Walter Matthau really made it work.
Welcome! Now, let me tell you why they had to pretend that Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers were some sort of “fictional” characters …
ETA: In The Core, an intelligent, high-performing person learns that she must experience failure spectacularly before she can get an accurate measure of herself. That is a very good point, and for some reason, not a point made too often in movies.
One counterexample I can think of: Casino Royale, the first one: David Niven, Peter Sellers, Woody Allen, and I forget who else (Orson Welles, but it was a past-his-prime Orson Welles, so probably shouldn’t count). You’d think the resulting movie, no matter how bad the script, would still have funny in it.
I disagree. Given the amount of star power and the idea of spoofing James Bond, Casino Royale was certainly disappointing. But it had its moments, particularly Deborah Kerr’s hilariously over the top performance and a lot of Woody Allen’s material.
An example I’d cite is Airplane!. True, the gags kept coming, but would it have been anywhere near as memorable without Peter Graves, Lloyd Bridges, Robert Stack and Barbara Billingsley?
A great movie, worth watching just for those three actors.
Played by great actors. Jonathon Pryce was fantastic as always.
For my own contribution, Undercover Blues. The premise: two married spies are on leave with their new baby when they’re called back into action. It’s a very 80s/early 90s plot, and sounds almost like a cheap sitcom. The writing is better than that, but the cast (Dennis Quaid, Kathleen Turner, Fiona Shaw, Stanley Tucci, Obba Babatunde, Larry Miller) turn in absolutely fantastic performances. They’re all just a joy to watch, especially Quaid and Tucci. They turn a goofy premise into something absolutely entertaining.
And although he doesn’t make up a great cast by himself, John Turturro saved Transformers.
