Its common to rave about great examples of child acting, but its time to take those uppity pompous child actors down a peg!
My nomination- I just had the mispleasure of sitting throught the Eddie Murphy yawner The Haunted Mansion, and the kid playing Murphy’s son actually accomplished the impossible by giving a worse perfromance than Murphy- the same facial expression when something funny or scary was going on, clearly not knowing what his reaction should be at any given time, etc. I mean , how hard is it to find a ten year old actor kid who knows how to look scared at a freaking spider? I noticed a couple of occasions where he was on screen but they purposely blocked his reaction shot at the goings on, as it was probably inapporpriate for the scene.
I was going to nominate the wooden performance by HJO in the Sixth Sense, but figured it was just me as it was Oscar nominated and all, but I still thought it was laughably bad.
Macaulay Culkin was pretty awful in Home Alone and Dakota Fanning creeps me out in just about everything, but yeah, it’s pretty hard to get worse than Jake Lloyd.
Dakota Fanning was especially annoying in War of the Worlds, specifically with whatever panic attack/phobia thing she was supposed to have, but that was really more a stupid aspect of the script.
For an obscure one, River Phoneix’s younger brother in Running on Empty- bad acting and really odd looking.
They were going to film a scene with Sulu meeting a kid, his many-greats-grandfather, on the street in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, but the child actor (dunno his name) was having a very bad day. Try as they might, they just couldn’t shoot the scene. Pressed for time, they dropped it entirely.
Well, that doesn’t say much. He was a kid. He may have decided he didn’t like acting. The guy who played Charlie in the old Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now a farm vet. Wasn’t because he couldn’t hack it, it was because he decided he liked cows more than movies.
An older picture,I have no idea what it was,but there was a gun shot.
Right before the shot was fired,a kid in crowd(with his back turned to the shooter) covers his ears in anticipation of the shot.
One child actor that I’ve never really been able to dig is Freddie Highmore. I’ve seen three movies with him as one of the child leads (Finding Neverland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The Spiderwick Chronicles), and in each one he plays essentially the same character: disenchanted, aloof, slightly pissed off little kid. I mean, maybe this is more of a fault of the screenwriters, but it depresses me a little to see a young kid act so emo at such an age, and it’s the same kid every time. In TSC he also does double-duty as a twin brother who’s an uber-pacifist, a character which kind of got on my nerves after a while.
Funny you mentioned him as I was coming in here to name him as an example of the genre (far from the worst child actor, but his “acting” does get distracting as the movie goes on).
Okay, we got this off-brand movie capitalizing on LOTR called “Max Magician and the Legend of the Rings.” Um, here it is. Their casting director has to have been on hallucinogens. Ahhhnuld as “The Terminator” had more range. It’s cringingly awful. Even my kids think so.
I knew this would be the first response when I read the OP. I have to say that I don’t really think it’s a fair choice. He was pretty bad yes (although I thought Hayden Christensen was pretty horrible in the other two), but he was also directed by the worst director of humans in the business. Generally a child actor is going to need a bit more direction than an older actor and Lucas can’t even handle the adults. He may actually be a bad actor (I haven’t seen his other work so I don’t know) but I think the blame for that one goes on Lucas.
As a side note, Lucas seems to be the perfect director if you want to know which actors need a lot of direction and which ones are able to do a good job with little to none.
Oh yeah, I nominate Edward Furlong in T2. I can barely watch that movie because of him.
I recall not thinking much of Vanessa Lee Chester as Malcolm’s daughter in Jurassic Park 2, but she might have actually just been doing a good job playing an unlikable character.
Or maybe it’s because all of my memories of that movie were steeped in a putrid ichor of hate.
