Let's be real: Even if you've managed to get Oscar winners to don tights and trade quips
with space raccoons, you're bound to drop the ball every once in a while.
Try not to cringe too hard as we dive headfirst into the MCU's worst casting decisions ever.
Thor: The Dark World is one of the most forgotten entries of the MCU.
Sure, it set up another Infinity Stone, gave Jane Foster and the gang something to do,
and brought Loki back after, of course, seemingly killing him off earlier in the same flick.
But that's about it.
It's just kind of there.
A huge part of Dark World's failure to resonate was Eccleston's limp portrayal of Malekith.
Malekith, a dark elf currently at the center of Marvel's "War of the Realms" comic event,
is a malevolent trickster with a taste for wicked turnabouts and gleeful cruelty.
Eccleston's embodiment reflects exactly, uhh... none of this.
"Darkness returns, Asgardian.
Have you come to witness the end of your universe?"
His aims are vague something something return the universe to darkness, yada yada the rightful
destiny of the dark elves: standard villain gobbledegook and his personality is no better
defined.
If you remember anything, it's his round-eyed mask and elaborately braided hair and having
your performance overshadowed by the costuming department is never what an actor should aim
for.
It's hard to waste the smooth, icy Mads Mikkelsen as a villain.
From Casino Royale to Hannibal, he's spent most of his career sending chills down audiences'
spines.
And when the story around him is well-told and acted, that makes it a doubly impressive
feat to somehow bungle his character.
Solid writers, story, colleagues, and costuming, plus the dude who played Le Chiffre as the
villain?
How could that possibly go wrong?
Doctor Strange showed us how.
Despite the fact that it's a dizzyingly shot, snappily-written origin story and despite
how brilliant Benedict Wong and Benedict Cumberbatch are in their principal roles Mikkelsen's Kaecilius,
the magic-user who serves the fiendish Dormammu, is utterly forgettable.
Like Malekith, the most memorable thing about his character is the make-up wizardry performed
upon him to make it look as though his skin is flaking away beneath his eyes.
Beyond that, uhhh… there are a few cool tricks he does with his magic blades?
Maybe a quip or two that landed okay?
He is totally wasted in the role and entirely overshadowed by the rest of the largely enjoyable
movie.
At least he's got the rest of his filmography to fall back on.
Mickey Rourke is definitely not forgettable as Ivan Vanko.
He gobbles up scenery with a spoon, letting the light catch in his gold teeth whenever
he can, brandishing his Russian accent like a saber at every scene partner.
"Hey, man.
Don't get too attached to things.
Learn to let go."
Many entries on this list are here because they are cinematic non-entities, entirely
swallowed up in the shadows of other actors, special effects, and the ever-growing tower
of MCU worldbuilding.
That ain't the case here.
Iron Man 2 is widely considered one of the lesser Marvel movies, but if you remember
anything about it, you remember Ivan Vanko.
But honestly, is that really a good thing?
Rourke is a bit too present in the role as an actor, he never disappears into the character.
It's almost entertaining on its own to watch Rourke put so much energy into Vanko, but
ultimately, it distracts from everything around it.
Years after the fact, you don't recall the family debts the character was trying to repay
you remember the accent, the teeth, the bird, the whips.
You remember everything around the character but not the character himself.
And in movie terms, that's an unforgivable flaw.
Quick: remember everything you can about Christine Palmer.
If that name doesn't ring a bell, and it probably doesn't, just replace it with "Doctor Strange's
girlfriend."
Okay, you might reply, she was a doctor too, and there's that one scene they have in a
closet together in the hospital, and you're pretty sure you remember the actress from
that Notebook movie.
If you did any better than that, you should be commended.
Christine Palmer is, effectively, a girlfriend-shaped prop.
This isn't exactly unique there are a lot of forgettable Girlfriend X roles that talented
actresses make the best of.
But some of them see Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter or Zoe Saldana's Gamora manage to break
out and become something more.
McAdams' Christine Palmer just kind of… stands around.
Like Kaecilius, the general psychedelia of the movie surrounding her serves to overshadow
her completely, and really, that isn't entirely a bad thing it's a pretty incredible spectacle,
after all.
Still, we get the feeling that even the Time Stone wouldn't be able to bring McAdams' unmemorable
performance back from the dead.
"This … Some things just can't be fixed."
If there was ever a moment Iron Fist seemed like a good idea, no one remembers it.
Now that it's been officially canceled, the cultural autopsy can be performed, and by
far the biggest problem is Finn Jones' weak performance.
Danny Rand is let's face it reality-shatteringly annoying, and he never quite stops being so.
He's a young billionaire searching for himself, and yet somehow, he's even more irritating
than that description implies.
His quest for identity makes him seem too often like a brat at worst, a boring "also-ran"
of a Hero's Journey protagonist at best.
When you're not rolling your eyes at him, you're yawning and, when it comes to TV, a
yawn is arguably worse than a cringe.
When someone mentions Quicksilver, your mind probably jumps to Evan Peters' zippy, sarcastic
portrayal in the X-Men movies.
Watching him turn moments of terror into high-speed slapstick performances is an absolute delight,
something between a ballet and a Marx Brothers spoof.
He's a bright spot in an increasingly dark franchise that no one anticipated, a total
joy and surprise.
Oh.
Then there's this dude.
"You didn't see that coming?"
You might remember him from Avengers: Age of Ultron.
On the other hand, you might not remember him at all.
It's not actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson's fault, really.
He couldn't have known he'd end up compared to Evan Peters' unexpectedly brilliant take
on the character.
But the fact is that his portrayal of Pietro Maximoff is, well, unremarkable.
He has the right moves, of course, and his tragic death is, well, tragic.
But there's a reason Wanda, his sister who has remained a part of the MCU, never seems
to bring him up: no one cares.
Taylor-Johnson did his job and nothing more.
He ran, he quipped, he died.
In a movie that contained James Spader, Scarlett Johansson, and Robert Downey Jr., you can't
exactly rake the dude over the coals for falling by the wayside.
Natalie Portman is a talented, versatile, and beloved actress that much we can all agree
on.
That said… her MCU character, Jane Foster, is one of the MCU's greatest failures.
Sure, she gives it the old college try in the first Thor movie, injecting Foster with
a charm, intelligence, and excitement at the prospect of wormholes and other dimensions.
But even then, her heart was clearly not in it, and by the time Thor: The Dark World rolled
around, it was hard to deny that she had checked out.
Jane just doesn't seem very connected to the world around her, let alone the developments
happening within it, and the performance fades, especially in comparison to any of her other
roles.
You can't win 'em all, but if you're Natalie Portman, you can take comfort in your Oscar
and the fact that you're basically a superhero yourself.
Believe it or not, but there was a time when people laughed at the idea of a Guardians
of the Galaxy movie.
We're glad that time has past but it's still crazy to imagine that viewers have gotten
behind a talking raccoon, a sentient tree, and a morally malleable, blue-skinned space…
nanny.
"I'm Mary Poppins, y'all!"
R.I.P., brother…
R.I.P.
Anyway, Guardians of the Galaxy went on to become a huge hit and a pillar of the modern
MCU.
But as much as we love Star-Lord and his merry band of misfits, we don't really care much
for the movie's bad guy, Ronan the Accuser.
It's no surprise why: he's exceptionally boring in a movie that is anything but.
He's mad about space warfare that the audience has no real stake in, carries a giant hammer,
wears dramatic eyeliner, and… that's pretty much it.
When he showed up again in Captain Marvel, Marvel made sure he was toting his hammer
in every shot, lest we forget who he was.
And who could blame us for doing so?
If we remember Ronan for anything, it's for being beaten in a galactic dance-off.
Look: We're not saying Ronan's yawn-inducing characterization is actor Lee Pace's fault.
In fact, if Ronan's whole shtick is being single-mindedly lawful evil, and super grouchy,
then Pace has got this guy down pat.
What we are saying is that pretty much anybody in the pantheon of Marvel baddies would've
made a more interesting villain than this dude.
Emil Blonsky is an elite soldier who becomes Abomination, the endpoint of the darkest path
Bruce Banner could take.
Nothing stops him from gobbling up power he has no kindly girlfriend, noble attitude,
or passion for science.
He just wants to be bigger, better, and burlier.
His fight against the Hulk is a spectacular one in which, as Banner goes on to sheepishly
recall in The Avengers, they, quote, "break Harlem."
Cool, right?
Banner versus a grim reflection of himself, power against the looming specter of corruption,
two giant man-beasts fighting to the death.
And yet, despite the memorable climax, Tim Roth as Blonsky simply fails to deliver.
One wonders if, had the stars aligned to make this early effort more like the MCU we know
now, all that potential could have been actualized the way the Hulk deserves.
But it wasn't.
Roth never gets to the core of his conflict with Banner, nor the nature of his own evil.
He's just a bad guy, doing bad things for the sake of it.
This gleeful, one-note evil can still lead to great cinema Willem Dafoe as the crazed
Green Goblin comes to mind but that is very much not the case in The Incredible Hulk.
Roth does what he has to do, and absolutely nothing more.
Inhumans was a total flop for which which Serinda Swan can only be partially blamed.
Nothing about it worked.
The special effects were cartoonish when they weren't outright bizarre, the translation
of the Inhumans' fantastical world from page to screen never rose above awkward, and even
the best and most experienced members of the cast seemed ill-suited to their characters.
It came and went without much of a fuss few were excited for it, few saw it, and few discuss
it now that's done and dusted.
It was, to put it simply, a failure.
So no, it's not entirely Swan's fault.
But if there is one person who embodies the slow-motion implosion that was Inhumans, it
is her.
Part of it is her costuming her wig is atrocious on every level, from its oddly stiff motion
to its Ronald McDonald shade of red.
Some of it is the absurd situations the writers placed her in.
But most of it is the maudlin melodrama she brings to her scenes.
There is no moment of Inhumans that more perfectly symbolizes the project's sheer stupidity than
watching Swan deliver a drawn-out, feral-cat-in-the-alleyway yowl as her hair is shorn by the fiendish
Maximus.
It's meant to be a moment of cruelty, but it's straight-up hilarious to watch her crumble
at the touch of a decidedly unfantastic pair of electric clippers.
Nothing can stop the Inhumans, apparently, except a hasty haircut.
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