The Flixster guide to truly great actors in films that truly suck.

Okay, we love Al Pacino. He's lost a lot of the restrained brilliance of the young Micheal Corleone, but even in the midst of some of the most overblown screen rants Hollywood has ever seen, Al is just so damn watchable that we don't care. As long as we're not watching Revolution (1985) that is. In perhaps the worst casting since Sean Connery as a Russian sub commander in The Hunt For Red October, Pacino plays Scottish-American fur trader Tom Dobb. With his son and stunningly bad accent, he stumbles through the American revolutionary war in the most jaw-dropping array of coincidences, plot contrivances, and bad editing of the decade. That this film cost nearly $30 million to make and took in less than $400,000 domestic is a testament to a bygone era when moviegoers actually cared about what they were spending their money on. Sadly, you won't find any excerpts from this film on the Net as proof, but if you're diligent, I'm sure you can find a copy in the dollar bin at your local convenience store.

No, I'm not talking about American Gangster. Long before this year's wannabe classic crime drama hit the screen, Crowe and Washington wallowed in a fairly painful sci-fi cop thriller called Virtuousity (1995). Crowe plays a psychotic computer program that bullies its wimpy scientist-creator into helping it live outside of the virtual world and go on a killing spree. Washington is the only cop smart-or-is-that-crazy enough to stop him. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Sylvester Stallone's Demolition Man (a similar film made the previous year) is far superior, since at least it makes no attempt take itself seriously. I'd like to believe that Washington's phoned-in performance was actually an incredibly subtle and nuanced take that got lost behind all the amazingly futuristic giant-screen TV's, but Crowe's is indefensible. He actually seems to believe that bellowing incoherently while firing an automatic weapon is a legitimate acting technique. I guess when a film's tagline is "Justice Needs a New Program", you really shouldn't expect much.

With a distinguished career that includes landmark films like Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, GoodFellas and Raging Bull, I'm inclined to cut someone like Robert De Niro a break once in awhile for mediocrity like Meet the Fockers. But Analyze That? Come on man! And Godsend?! Mix equal parts Sixth Sense, Boys From Brazil, and The Omen, add De Niro as a mad gene-splicing scientist, and you should come up with a movie that was at least as scary as that thing the weird kid in fourth grade used to do with turning his eyelids inside out, right? Wrong. Godsend is actually less scary than Mary Poppins. Seriously, it's a horror movie where nobody dies. True, most of the problems stem from shooting the film before the script was, um, written, but here De Niro substitutes his usual meticulous attention to craft with grinding two metal balls together in the palm of his hand ("mwa-ha-ha! I'm mad, mad I tell you!"). Or maybe that was just a way for him to concentrate on anything besides the massive onslaught of tired clichés he was dealing with in this movie. In any case, if you look at his listing at Flixster, it seems pretty clear that some time around 1999 De Niro was struck by a neurological condition which caused him to gradually lose the ability to discern a good script from a tightly coiled pile left on his front lawn by the neighborhood dog.

It's true, the actor who gave a terrifying and astounding performance as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland has never been particularly known for making stellar choices, but even when he was in so-so movies like Panic Room and Phone Booth, he managed to elevate them to something better than what they otherwise might have been. I can forgive him a lot of things, but I will never forgive him for Battlefield Earth. I don't really need to say anything here except, yes, it really is as bad as everyone says it is. Travolta was obviously giving in to the D-movie actor that's always lurked just beneath the surface, but, Forest, what was your excuse?

Battlefield Earth Trailer

In a stunning example of how a good cast does not necessarily make a good movie, witness Jodi Foster, Dennis Hopper, Joe Pesci, and John Turturro in Catchfire, aka Backtrack (1990). Hopper is the sax-playing hit man with a soft heart. Foster is the hit that he falls in love with. On the run from the cops and the mob, they find love (I am not making this up). Let's not forget John Turturro in a cowboy hat. Who thought that could ever be a good idea? This movie isn't Battlefield Earth bad, by any means, but it's here because of the wasted potential. If a director (in this case Hopper himself) is lucky enough to get this much solid talent into a room, the least he could do is give us something better than a 1974 Movie of the Week starring Dennis Weaver and Angie Dickinson. Hopper actually took his name off this film because he "didn't like the edit". Yeah, right. Personally, I think he probably made the movie just so he could see Jodi without her clothes. The trailer is worth watching for the cheeseball music and voiceover alone.

Backtrack Trailer

Speaking of wasted talent, I have to take just a short moment to shake my fist and swear in the direction of Marin County and George Lucas. Star Wars: Episodes One and Two represent such a massive waste of potential on so many fronts that it warrants its own Discovery Channel series. I can only lay the blame entirely at the feet of Lucas (masterfully screwing his own pooch—or is that Wookie?) who was somehow able to transform a dynamic and talented cast into a set of lifeless, annoying cardboard cutouts.

Featuring a cabal of villains dressed in day glow teddy bear outfits, editing by Michael Myers, and some of the most embarrassing "repartee" ever penned, The Avengers (1996) nearly did for Ralph Fiennes what A Time To Kill did for Matthew McConaughey. The Avengers was one of the earliest in the Vintage-TV-to-Film trend, and still stands as possibly the worst of the lot--although I haven't seen Underdog yet. Many times, a good actor will still be good, regardless of the trash he's in. This is not one of those times. In fact, this film boasts some of the worst performances clocked in by ANY of its stars (and in the case of Sean Connery, that's saying something). Really, did no one notice all of the bugs and small animals dropping dead in the vicinity of the script? The only possible use this movie might have is as a drinking game. Drink every time you feel like saying WTF?? Chug whenever Uma Thurman changes costume, or Sean Connery delivers an embarrassing line. Who knows? By the end of the movie, it might actually make sense.

Laura Linney is one of those actors that can usually make even a cinematic pile of doo seem pretty decent. However, even she couldn't save the B-movie crappiness that was Congo (1995). Before I saw Congo, I would have sworn that any movie that featured a lost city in the African jungle, a Romanian con-artist played by Tim Curry, and a previously unknown species of intelligent hyper-violent, flesh-eating gorillas couldn't possibly be boring (bad yes, boring no). But I swear to god, even though all of those things are in the movie. Twenty minutes into Congo, you will find yourself wishing you were watching Meerkat Manor instead. Okay, so putting aside the terrible dialogue, the interminable set-up, the conveniently erupting volcano, the annoying talking "good" gorilla, and the fact that Tim Curry seems to be in a completely different movie than the rest of the cast; the one thing you can take from this movie is to never, ever let a hippo get the drop on you.

We've seen amazing performances from Gabriel in movies like Miller's Crossing and The Usual Suspects. Like Forest Whitaker, he's also done his share of questionable roles as well. When he's good, Byrne is very good, but when he's bad, he's in Cool World. Supposedly a more "adult" answer to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Cool World is such an unholy mess, it's hard to know who to be more embarrassed for: Byrne, director Ralph Bakshi, or those poor sad cartoons that had to act with Brad Pitt.

Ben, excuse me—Academy Award winner Sir Ben Kingsley—has turned out what is probably the finest example of what this list is all about. That is to say, the disparity between Kingsley's talent and the stinking foulness that was Bloodrayne (2006) is so vast that it boggles the mind. I mean, did he wake up one morning and say to himself, "Say, Ben old chap, here's a thought: let's see how hard it is to completely tank our credibility as a classically-trained Shakespearean actor?" I really can't say it better than Howard Taylor did in his stellar review of the film, so I'll just quote him here: "If I find out that you went and saw this film after I told you not to, I'll phone your friends up and tell them to go to your house and pour ants in your bed. And when you wake up screaming, covered in ants, you'll think 'at least I'm not still watching BloodRayne.'"