It’s very easy to cite great actors in jaw-droppingly terrible movies. Hell, pretty much EVERY actor with a resume of reasonable length has a terrible dog on there somewhere. As Michael Caine said of Jaws IV, “I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve heard that it’s terrible. I have seen the house that it built, and it is fantastic.”
But here’s a twist; what is the worst actor, or worst performance, ever, in a truly great movie?
Note that you cannot yourself think the movie was terrible. Otherwise the entire thread will be people saying “Titanic won the Oscar but Leonardo DiCaprio is the suxxor that movie sucked.” No. **If you legitimately believe Titanic was just an awesome movie **and deserved the Oscar, but Billy Zane sucked, fair answer. You have to cite performances from movies you think were truly great.
We’ll have two categories:
Worst Performance By An Actor/Actress In A Truly Great Movie
Performance By The Worst Overall Actor/Actress In a Great Movie, Given Their Entire Body of Work, But In This Movie He/She Was Not As Terrible As They Usually Are
PULP FICTION was robbed at the Oscars – but as good as Quentin Tarantino is at making a masterpiece, he’s jarringly bad at fielding the Steve Buscemi role.
I’ve never been impressed with his acting; I call him ‘Cardboard Boy.’ He played the stereotype alright as Bill S. Preston, but otherwise he fields a big ‘meh’ from me, even in The Matrix.
Most grating for me, although I guess you could call it a good acting job, in a movie that I consider great but most others probably wouldn’t, is Chris Tucker as Ruby Rhod in The Fifth Element.
Paul Le Mat in American Graffiti never really impressed me either…he just seemed kind of wooden.
Welles’s Touch of Evil - one of my faves, with one of the greatest openings in cinema history - but Dennis Weaver’s spasmodic milksop character was in need of soaking in lye for 24 hours.
Lost In Translation is a near perfect movie, IMHO. The biggest flaw is Anna Faris’s small scene. Just ruined that part. Nowhere near as good as the rest of the cast.
Animal House would have been a much better movie if someone other than Tom Hulce was cast as Pinto. Hard to find anyone in that cast with a notable role that was worst.
What was so bad about Hulce? He did what was required of the role, didn’t ham it up or try to steal scenes, and was pretty convincing as a dim bulb frat boy.
Tom Hardy’s cheesy Scottish accent in The Dark Knight Rises is just one of the reasons the movie blew chunks, but it was really popular.
Sex, Lies and Videotape and Groundhog Day are truly great movies, and Andie MacDowell was awful in each. Her woodenness played to her role in SL&V, and Bill Murray just acted past her in GD.
Brad Pitt’s acting talent went from passable to pretty good sometime around 2000. Before that, he basically had two acting modes, big cheesy grin or rubbing his hands over his head in craziness/anger/distraughtness. He did those two well enough and his roles allowed him to largely coast on them, but you could see the occasional place where neither was called for and he seemed a bit out of his depth. After 2000, he’s been a solid and sometimes even very good actor. But pre-2000, he was probably the weakest lead part in:
Seven
12 Monkeys
Meet Joe Black
He was sufficient. His presence didn’t crap all over the movies he was in (unlike Keanu Reeves in some of the movies he’s been mentioned for - but which I don’t find to be great), but you definitely wouldn’t miss him if he’d been swapped out with someone else.
(I can’t say whether he was good/mediocre by the time of Fight Club. I feel like it was still his mediocre period, but that the role only needed him to be happy and loud - one of his early specialties.)