From hokey death scenes to badly written monologues, and characters appearing that make no sense
in the context of the movie, the 2010s had many cringe-worthy acting moments that will
go down in cinema infamy.
These are just a few of the worst offenders of the decade.
The concluding chapter of Christopher Nolan's gritty Dark Knight trilogy ended with a bunch
of explosive bangs thanks to Bane and his associates, but also with a bit of a fizzle
featuring the super unfortunate in-movie death of Marion Cotillard's Miranda Tate, aka Talia
al Ghul.
After orchestrating a series of huge protests with a rising death toll of innocent Gothamites,
Talia al Ghul crashes her truck and with a melodramatic gasp and sigh, falls back dead
but not before detonating her final bomb.
"My father's work…is done…"
The moment is so incredibly hokey and laughable that it would have been perfectly matched
in the campy Adam West-led Batman TV series, but coming during Nolan's take on the franchise,
it feels hugely out of place.
We don't see a lot of Shakespearean villain-style monologues these days, and it's for good reason.
They don't tend to sound authentic outside Shakespeare's context, even for a megalomaniacal
character, and instead come across as painful exposition that ends up being funny rather
than menacing.
For example, look at Eddie Redmayne's portrayal of Balem Abrasax in the Wachowskis' space
opera Jupiter Ascending, which follows a young Earth woman named Jupiter who learns that
she's actually interstellar royalty a revelation that puts Balem's control of the universe
in jeopardy.
Jupiter Ascending is filled with cringeworthy moments, from Channing Tatum's eyeliner to
Kunis' overly earnest performance, but Redmayne wins for one of the worst acted scenes of
the past decade.
"I CREATE LIFE…and I destroy it."
In the years since, Redmayne himself has admitted his work in Jupiter Ascending left a lot to
be desired.
He even told GQ in an interview:
"I won a prize for it for the worst performance of the year.
So, yeah, it was a pretty bad performance by all accounts."
For many Harry Potter fans, the fact that Hermione Granger ended up with Ron Weasley
and not Harry was an unsatisfying way to end the characters' story.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 did its part to muddy those waters by featuring
an intimate scene between Harry and Hermione while Ron is off looking for Salazar Slytherin's
locket Horcrux.
In order to make a despondent Hermione buck up for a minute, Harry asks her to dance,
and they hip and dip around awkwardly to Nick Cave's haunting song "O Children."
The actors look incredibly uncomfortable not just dancing with each other, but on their
own, and no amount of fancy camera work could have helped them pull off the scene.
If it weren't for Nick Cave's vocals and beautiful lyrics, the moment would have been a complete
disaster even as it foreshadows Ron's eventual jealous blow-up about Harry and Hermione's
possibly romantic feelings for each other.
Quentin Tarantino has a long history of inserting himself into his movies, and Django Unchained
is arguably one of his worst cameo moments.
This antebellum revisionist history features Jamie Foxx as Django, an escaped slave assisted
by dentist-turned-bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz out to wreak bloody vengeance on slavers,
including Calvin Candie, who has also kidnapped his love Hildi Von Shaft.
As Django's rampage heats up, the movie cuts to a flashback in which Tarantino appears,
speaking in a dodgy Australian accent before Django kills him that completely derails the
climax of the film.
"A little dynamite for you black fellas to play with!"
Yahoo!
News UK suggested that Tarantino sported an Australian accent because he couldn't do a
passable Southern one, which begs the question of why he was even included in the movie at
all other than his director-sized ego, that is.
Sometimes there's just nothing even the best actors can do when the script veers into overwrought
territory, which is unfortunately the case with Interstellar, Christopher Nolan's story
about the intersection of science, technology, and family as well as wormholes and event
horizons, since Nolan can't make a movie without a mind-bending twist or two.
Sadly, the audience is well yanked out of the complicated but well-crafted story when
Anne Hathaway's character Amelia Brand prattles off a Hallmark greeting card of a monologue
that sounds considerably less than scientific.
"Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space."
This line comes as Brand makes her case that love is a quantifiable force in the universe
that can actually be used as a tool of measurement a pretty ridiculous concept, even though in
the logic of the movie, she turns out to be right.
But just because the movie makes the concept real doesn't mean that this speech introducing
it works, and even Hathaway's considerable talent can't make the monologue sound anything
but forced.
Thankfully the scene is only two minutes of pure cheddar in an otherwise compelling sci-fi
drama, but it's also enough to stick out as one of the worst acted scenes of the past
decade.
"Three Americans are hailed as heroes for foiling an attack on a high-speed train in
Europe."
It was a real-life event that made news around the globe: Three American men traveling from
Amsterdam to Paris thwarted a would-be terrorist mass shooter through their own quick thinking
and selfless bravery.
Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, and Alek Skarlatos wrestled the weapon from the gunman and saved
the life of one of his victims, American Mark Moogalian, who was the first to identify the
terrorist.
Later, French authorities found the shooter had been armed with 300 rounds of bullets,
more than enough to have killed most of the people on the train had he not been stopped.
Clint Eastwood directed The 5:17 to Paris and, in a surprising move, decided to cast
the four American survivors, including the gunshot victim Moogalian, as themselves.
Unfortunately, the experiment didn't exactly pay off in this big-budget Hollywood recreation
of real events.
These men are heroes, and did an incredible service for their fellow passengers, but they're
not professional actors, and it's very clear to audiences.
"Look at the baby soda, Spencer!"
"Alek, shut the heck up."
The 2010s saw Nicolas Cage in a number of dreadful movies, but Drive Angry stands out
as one of the worst.
The actor delivers a furious but empty turn as John Milton, a man who's been dead 10 years
and returns to Earth from Hell in order to save his infant granddaughter from being sacrificed
to Satan.
His one-liners fall so flat you'd think an ACME truck rolled over them.
"Nothing of this Earth can kill me!"
"I'm not of this Earth."
It's hard to pick a least favorite scene the absurd gunfight sex scene?
Milton peeing fire?
Cage rebounded in later years with more critically acclaimed fare like the gonzo Mandy, but for
a decent chunk of the decade, it seemed like he may have permanently lost his way and Drive
Angry is a perfect example of why.
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