Even the best actor can't turn in the greatest performance of a lifetime every time they're
on camera, but bad acting can be so jaw-droppingly awful that you just can't turn away.
Here are some of the worst performances in cinema history.
1978's Superman: The Movie would set the standard that big-screen superhero stories tried to
live up to for the next thirty years, and a lot of that has to do with the cast.
Between Gene Hackman clearly having fun as a slimy, conniving Lex Luthor and Christopher
Reeve perfectly embodying the humanity of Superman, the first movie's acting is absolutely
stellar.
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, which hit theaters nearly a decade later...not so much.
"You are nothing.
I am the father now."
"You have my voice."
"No.
You have my voice."
To be fair, even the Man of Steel himself couldn't carry this hacky, goofball script
to a good movie.
The acting is flat-out bad, but it's hard to blame Reeve, since his villain in this
one, Nuclear Man, is a personality free lunkhead that doesn't give him much to work with.
It's honestly hard to tell if Reeve is sick of playing the role for diminishing returns,
or if he's trying to give Clark Kent a certain amount of mind-bending ineptitude in order
to conceal his true identity.
When you start wondering if the star of the film is doing a bad job on purpose, you know
you're in trouble.
Trying to list off every single problem with 1991's Kevin Costner blockbuster Robin Hood:
Prince of Thieves would probably take longer than the actual movie, but there's one that
sticks out for everyone who's seen it, or listened to it.
To put it charitably, the accents could use a little bit of work.
Maybe they decided that England's greatest folk hero should sound like he was from California
because Big Kev's attempt at sounding British came out like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins,
and that was actually the better option.
Maybe they thought dialogue about men dying to defend horses was so good no one would
notice the accent.
Either way, the second he opened his mouth was probably when everyone else decided they
weren't even going to bother trying.
Everyone, that is, except Alan Rickman.
His awesome scenery-chewing performance as the Sheriff of Nottingham has some of the
best lines in his long career of playing big-screen villains.
"Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and
call off Christmas!"
Unfortunately, audiences could only see those diamonds if they got through the unbearable
trash around it, and Rickman being that good makes the rest of the movie that much more
painful to watch.
It's a shame, too.
When he's not talking about dead horses, a weird recurring theme in his career, Costner's
not bad, and a supporting cast that included Morgan Freeman and Christian Slater could
have made for a fun adventure.
Emphasis on "could have."
As in, "did not."
Let's take a moment to cast our minds all the way back to 1999, when the promise of
a new Star Wars movie for the first time in nearly two decades had everyone excited.
Every new piece of information got us more hyped up than the last: Darth Maul looked
awesome!
There was a double-bladed lightsaber!
We were going to find out the origin story for Darth Vader, arguably the single most
iconic villain in pop culture history!
Even the title was ominous, with the promise of secrets that could threaten a galaxy.
And then it came out.
We might've tried to convince ourselves as we stumbled out of the theater that it wasn't
that bad, but it was, in ways that no one expected.
Natalie Portman has been well known as a fantastic actress since she was literally 12 years old,
but thanks to the direction, her performance as Teen Queen Amidala was literally like watching
a cardboard cutout do math.
Liam Neeson, another fantastic actor, also displayed the charisma of a tree stump, and
was also more than a little creepy in the scenes where he tried to lure a child off-planet
with him.
Jar Jar Binks was…well, all we need to say about that one is "Jar Jar Binks," but at
least he had that classic Star Wars comic relief, right?
"On second thought, no, not really, no."
"No."
"This embarrassing!"
It's a pretty bad state of affairs when your stars are out-acted by an army of computer-generated
drones.
Halle Berry may have been really, really bad in Catwoman, but you have to give her credit:
she owned it in a way few other actors would.
Not only was she very up front about how bad the movie was, she showed up in person to
pick up her Worst Actress "award," at the Razzies, and brought her Oscar with her in
one of Hollywood's all-time great baller moves.
So yeah, Catwoman is the kind of bad where everyone from the stars to the screenwriters
are well aware of what they were shoveling into the cinema.
The script was Frankensteined together from multiple versions over the course of a decade,
and the acting was exactly the level that the screenplay called for.
True to her word, Berry in particular is a standout, for certain definitions, in the
scenes where she's called on to literally act like a cat.
"Cream. Straight up."
Of course, acknowledging that it was a bad movie is all well and good, but maybe someone
could've spoken up before it was finished, and left it in the litter box where it belongs.
Picking one single example of the truly abysmal quality of Battlefield Earth is difficult.
Somehow, this legendary train wreck of a movie still has a 3 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Perhaps those positive reviews came from critics who never made it to the theater because they
got kicked in the head by a horse, but decided to write a review anyway.
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"
Next time, take the sick day.
"Bad" doesn't even begin to describe this film.
"Incomprehensibly bad" comes a little closer, though, if only because both the plot and
the performances are nearly impossible to figure out.
"We've decided to keep you here for another FIFTY cycles!
With endless options for renewal...with endless options for renewal...with endless options
for renewal."
You wouldn't know it from this movie, but the cast has plenty of talent, most of which
can be seen in their ability to say the word "man-animal" roughly eight thousand times
without staring directly into the camera and asking why.
Say what you will, but that takes years of training.
"While you were still learning how to spell your name, I was being trained to conquer
galaxies!"
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