The Most Terribly Acted Movies Of All Time

It's no secret actors make a ton of money. You'd think they'd at least make an effort, right? You know, earn their money? That's not always the case, and while there's definitely entertainment in watching a movie that's bad on purpose (we're looking at you, Sharknado), let's take a look at some movies starring actors that should have been good if the actors hadn't checked out before they finished reading the script.

Do you really get into your Dungeons & Dragons sessions? Does your character not just have a whole back story, a tragic childhood, and hopes and dreams that seem just tantalizingly out of reach? Do you make requests of your DM in character? If so, you're probably better at it than literally anyone who was in the 2000 screen adaptation of D&D.

There are a few big names there, too, but we're mostly looking at Jeremy Irons, who delivers a performance the Orlando Sentinel called "hamming." It's almost as though he couldn't believe his agent had booked him into a role that required robe-wearing, spell-casting, and dragon-imagining. Maybe he was cast just to spite someone and decided to go as over-the-top as he could. See him as the most annoying member of your gaming group. You know the one, the guy that actually does have a closet full of robes, wears them on a semi-regular basis, and insists on using his dirty Cheetos-fingers to move pieces around on the map. If you can make it through the film, keep an eye out for the Cheetos dust.

You probably don't go into any superhero movie expecting award-winning acting. That's fair. However, most people do expect everyone involved with the movie to take your nerd-cred as seriously as you do. (The most recent Marvel movies do this extraordinarily well.) Superman IV: The Quest for Peace ... not so much.

There's a weird thing that starts to happen here thanks to the combination of horrible acting and horrible storyline, and you can see it in the above clip. Are we watching a Christopher Reeve who's sick of wearing the suit or a Christopher Reeve who's playing a Clark Kent who's going for a certain amount of mind-bending ineptitude in order to conceal his true identity? When you start thinking like that, it turns into a massive headache. Is he being bad on purpose? At what point did he stop acting? On the plus side, pondering that will get you through the movie, which Jay Boyar of the Orlando Sentinel called "cinematic kryptonite."

It isn't going out on a limb to say that the accents in this Kevin Costner flick need a bit of work. It's unclear how they decided Robin Hood would hail from California, but it was probably at that point everyone else decided they weren't even going to bother trying.

Everyone except Alan Rickman. His awesome Sheriff of Nottingham makes the rest of it that much more painful to watch. It's like watching a single, talented up-and-coming actor struggling to hold together an amateur dramatic show because there's a talent scout from the Royal Shakespeare Company in the audience. If you haven't seen it in a while, you've probably forgotten there's a few other amazing people in it, like Morgan Freeman. He just gave up, too, and Empire magazine's Philip Thomas agreed, calling it "considerably smaller than the sum of its parts." That's nicer than you'll be if you give it a watch again.

The Swarm came out in 1978, so we can forgive a lot, like the bad special effects or the not-quite-thrilling-enough-for-a-thriller plot. On the other hand, it's not like good acting hadn't been invented yet. Even now, you know the names: Michael Caine, Richard Chamberlain, Henry Fonda, Olivia de Havilland. That's a lot of talent, so there's no excuse for this one not standing the test of time like pretty much any of Alfred Hitchcock's movies. It was even written by the more-than-competent Stirling Silliphant, who also wrote The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and In the Heat of the Night.

The film is all about a swarm of killer bees sweeping across the U.S., but it's clear that not a single actor believes bees are anywhere near the set. If you were to say "ow" right now, you'd be about as convincing as any of these actors bothered to be. Alan Jones from Radio Times called the entire thing "a hive of Hollywood has-beens [trying] to out-ham each other." If you really want more than 2.5 hours of bad bee special effects, you'd be better off watching the classic Oprah GIF on loop.

Sorry, Mr. Irons. We respect you, we really do, and while there's only so much you can do with material from yet another young adult paranormal romance, everyone expects better of you. That goes for Emma Thompson, too. These two set the tone for what could have been at least a watchable movie. There's acting, and then there's overacting with a vengeance. This movie might also leave you thinking there should be some kind of rule about putting on an accent for a film. There should be a committee or something. It might have prevented the accents — and performances — here, which Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers called "outrageously awful." How Alden Ehrenreich recovered from this performance to be cast as Young Han Solo, we'll never know.

You could write a whole book on what went on behind the scenes of 1996's Island of Dr. Moreau, and it would be miles better than the train wreck we got. It's shocking the movie got made at all, considering how hard Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer checked out from the start.

According to The Telegraph, things started to go sideways from the beginning, and Kilmer — who was brought in as a replacement — spent the entire time making unreasonable demands. Clearly not really wanting to be there, he even threw a mid-shoot temper tantrum that would make any toddler proud, sat down, and refused to get back up. 

Brando spent every morning dreaming up ways to change the script, and the script was rewritten every afternoon. The rest of his time was spent not learning his lines. All his lines were read to him through an earpiece, and is it any wonder that it came out so very badly? Oh — and, there was the added problem of crossed signals to Brando's earpiece. Every so often, he would be fed his "lines" from a police scanner, and David Thewlis says he once shouted during a scene, "There's a robbery at Woolworths!"

Brandon Judell from Critics Inc. offered possibly the best description of it, calling it "Satan's Sesame Street."

We have to give Halle Berry some massive kudos here, since she at least recognized what a completely horrible performance she gave in Catwoman. With a dismal 9 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, it stunk enough to win four Razzie Awards. Berry showed up in person to pick up her Worst Actress award, and she didn't hold back.

"I'd like to thank the rest of the cast," she said at the ceremony (via MTV). "To give a really bad performance like mine, you need to have really bad actors." Ouch! Halle, it's a little late. The time for the claws to come out was actually during filming.

District 9 was a pretty darn cool movie, with Rotten Tomatoes giving it an honorable 90 percent. So, when director Neill Blomkamp came out with the similarly sci-fi-themed Elysium a few years later, it seemed like it would be a pretty safe bet to allow yourself to be hopeful it'd be a comparably good ride. It was not.

Sorry, we're going to have to point some fingers here, because seriously, Jodie Foster? We know you can do better than that. But let's take it from the Duluth New Tribune's review, which had this to say about it: "Jodie Foster delivers an unbelievably terrible performance in Elysium. [...] A performance so awful I found myself keenly anticipating Foster's next scene to see if she would keep on bringing the dreadful. [...] It's amazing how bad she is in this movie."

She's not the only problem, either. Spectrum Culture noted the movie featured "some extreme overacting from supporting characters," while The Reader brought things full circle back to Foster, saying: "Jodie Foster is officially no longer a two-time Oscar winner. There's no way anyone can do what she just did in Elysium and get to keep golden bookends."

Let's step back in time for a minute, way back to 1999. Y2K was a legit worry, but there were more important things going on, namely a new Star Wars movie. Hopes rose as we found out more about it: Darth Maul looked awesome, there was a double-bladed lightsaber, and even the title was ominous in a promising sort of way. Then we sat through it and walked away trying to convince ourselves it couldn't have been that bad. Alas, it was.

Rolling Stone kicked off their review like this: "The actors are wallpaper, the jokes are juvenile, there's no romance, and the dialogue lands with the thud of a computer-instruction manual." Specifically? Well, in case you've forgotten, here are some points that reviewers from Rolling Stone to Time and The Hollywood Reporter leapt on: Natalie Portman as Amidala, wading through diplomatic dialogue she's clearly given up on making anything interesting, Jar Jar Binks' ... well, everything, including that terrible voice, and Liam Neeson being indescribably wooden and more than a little creepy when he decides the little kid needs to come off-planet with him. As for the kid, granted, it's tough finding child actors who are honestly good and capable of displaying human emotion, but they're out there. Unfortunately, they're not in The Phantom Menace.

"Whoopee!"

Say what you will about the Fifty Shades of Grey books, but they made a ton of money — so much money that they decided to make some movies based on them, which brought up an important question: How was that content going to make it to the big screen in a mainstream theater?

And here's the thing: At the heart of it is ... well, it's not love, or maybe it is? Lust? Infatuation? An entire subculture? At the heart of the story were two very attractive people who were, in fact, cast. But they were apparently cast separately, because they had no chemistry whatsoever, which is inconvenient for a film about all those aforementioned bodily functions.

ABC News described the acting of Fifty Shades Darker like this: "Too bad the sexual chemistry between Dornan and Johnson is like the sexual chemistry between a leprechaun and a sasquatch, neither of which actually exists." Cosmopolitan collected 15 of the meanest comments about Jamie Dornan's acting (which included gems like,"Well, any pair of fish lying next to each other at Seattle's famed Pike Place Market have more chemistry [than Dornan and Johnson],"), and you get the feeling they didn't have to stop at just 15. 

When Elle asked Dornan about the popularity of the series, the role, and the hype, he had this weird, weird response: "Mass appreciation doesn't always equate to something good. Think of Hitler!" Um... okay?