Good/Great Performances in Bad/Underwhelming Movies

On the flipside of my earlier article on 'good' performances by usually 'bad' actors, here's some performances that deserved a better film, but nevertheless stood out as particularly impressive bits of work in works that had little else to offer...I should note I haven't seen many of the 'worst' films of all-time, so many of these are simply 'not very good'; and that pretty much all of these are English language films, because the 'bad' films get more exposure in general than films from other countries, whereas films I've seen from Hong Kong, Japan, Italy, France etc. are all generally 'good' films. 

Alan Rickman, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

The film isn't terrible, but it is terribly bland, best represented by Kevin Costner's thoroughly charmless turn as Robin Hood, a slew of pretty weak supporting performances, and a rather wayward script that can't seem to decide whether it wants to be a straightforward re-telling of the story of the Prince of Thieves, or whether it wants to delve further into its withcraft or romantic subplots. The costumes and set design aren't bad, but not particularly notable either. There is however, one reason to watch it, and that's for the late great Alan Rickman. Rickman's coming from another sort of film here, in the best possible way: he's hammy and over the top, but deliciously so, and makes the Sheriff of Nottingham one extremely enjoyable villain to watch. Is it on the level of Hans Gruber? Well, no, but this sure isn't Die Hard, and fans of him in the likes of Harry Potter would be delighted to find this different side to the deadpan master with his hilarious and menacing performance here.

Eva Green, Sin City: A Dame to Kill For and 300: Rise of an Empire

2014 was an interesting year for actors. There were great actors giving great performances in multiple great films (Tom Hardy for The Drop and Locke), good actors giving impressive performances in substandard films (Jack O'Connell for Unbroken and Starred Up), and then you had the one and only Eva Green being the very best thing in two pretty terrible sequels. Sin City 2 is probably the slightly better film, but still suffers from being a very uninspired, generally terribly acted and completely discordant piece of mundanely stylized cinema, but Green sinks her teeth into the role of the titular dame Ava Lord, making you wish she did the noir femme fatale in a better film because of how darn entertaining she is here. Then, in a bad sequel to a film I didn't much like in the first place, her performance as Queen Artemisia is a breath of dazzling elegance and cruelty, adding so much colour to a film otherwise steeped in genetic action scene after generic action scene. Green's far too amazing an actress to be stuck in these sorts of roles; give her some meaty dramatic characters, Hollywood, please.

James Woods, Killer: A Journal of Murder

Woods is perhaps the king of excelling in bad movies. In very lackluster films like The Onion Field, White House Down and the various bits of The Specialist I dozed in and out of while on television, he manages to make the most out of some very limited films and roles. He's extremely great when given the right material (see: Salvador, Videodrome), and even in a rather trashy film like the morally suspect Killer, he's marvelous. Woods completely devours every scene he has as an unrepentant murderer who wishes to die. The film is a missed opportunity overall but he soars and gives a rather mesmerinng performance as Carl Panzram, leading one to wonder, if in a better film, he'd have had a chance to get an Oscar nomination.

Deborah Kerr, The End of the Affair

Perhaps because it's an adaptation of my favourite novel of all-time, but this adaptation falls seriously short on so many grounds. It fails as a romantic film, but transcends in terms of acting, and not even throughout the cast, Van Johnson is very average as the love interest, but Deborah Kerr, whose performance I cover here (http://actorvsactor.blogspot.hk/2015/06/head-to-head-end-of-affair-deborah-kerr.html). Though Sarah Miles is greatly watered down from the deeply complex source material, Kerr gives an invested and rather terrific performance; another example of her making the most out of frankly underwhelming material include Love on the Dole, Seperate Tables (the film is good but the way her role is written isn't all that great), and Eye of the Devil. There's a reason she's my favourite actress of all-time; she can mine gold out of any role with her unique acting approach.

Morgan Freeman, Street Smart

The film is utterly terrible and I can't even defend Christopher Reeve's performance (most of his non-Superman work was okay, this was not), it was a pretty big flop too, the only thing I can really recommend here is Freeman's performance as pimp Fast Black, who finds himself implicated by Reeve's reporter in a convoluted case of false reporting. Freeman is both suave and chilling in portraying such a despicable fiend. There's not a moment to his dynamic performance where he doesn't carry some threat and his mellifluous voice is used to unique perfection as a tool for menace.

Helen Mirren, Excalibur

I tried to watch this once with a friend, we quit about 20 minutes in, appalled by its quality. I tried again and I must admit, was not entirely focused for the most part. It's actually a serviceable film on the whole, I put it here because it feels like it only engages the viewer in short spurts, and could've been so much more. One indicator of that potential is Dame Helen, playing Morgana le Fay. Her scenes with Merlin (Nicol Williamson) seem to come from another film altogether, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the usually prim, proper and reserved Mirren play a pretty eeevil figure. In terms of more recent average films Mirren enlivens, check out Hitchcock, Woman in Gold are good places to start.

Raul Julia, Street Fighter

The film that started the trend of 'terrible video games adaptations', it unfortunately did not start off a trend of 'great actors giving great performances in terrible films'. Julia, in his final feature film role, really gave his all here, and if you know about the backstory to him making this film (he wanted to make a film his children would want to see because he was dying from stomach cancer), it's all the more remarkable. He was ill throughout the whole of this performance and most certainly could have phoned it in for the paincheck, but no, Julia decided to give it his all. It's performances like Julia's as M. Bison that completely denounce the notion that actively bad films cant breed actively good performances. He's kind of terrifying and oozes with power in a role that could've been a complete joke, and hilarious when need be in moments that could've fallen completely flat. A must-see if only for his performance.

Amanda Seyfried, Lovelace

The film's main flaw is that its structure of paralleling two 'versions' of Linda Boreman/'Linda Lovelace', star of the controversial 1972 porn film Deep Throat,  is not nearly as clever as it thinks. The film takes two extreme insights into the same sort of story beats and ends up feeling like more of a caricature than it should be, and is not at all helped by the performances of some of its cast like James Franco's terrible turn as Hugh Hefner. Dealing with such an inadequate film is Seyfried, an actress I generally find decent but nothing special. Well what Seyfried does here is quite special, in that she managed to make me feel deeply moved by her personal story and afflictions, and charmed by her charisma to show why she was such a big thing in the movie scene. She gave more dramatic weight than the film deserved, and for that I must consider this a performance well worth seeing, even if the film around it is seriously lacking.

Jennifer Jones, The Towering Inferno

One of the most generic disaster films ever made, this isn't 'Roland Emmerich at his worst' bad, but it's still pretty bad for a film that wastes a terribly great all-star cast in some rather bland disaster sequences. Jones as a posh fancy and all-round lovely guest Lisolette Mueller who's charmed by Fred Astaire's cheeky con, is one of the few real, humane characters in the film, giving a great deal of heart to a film that lacks any besides that. Her exit scene could've been heartbreaking, she certainly sets it up to be, unfortunately the way it's executed is horrible but that's no fault of hers.

Ben Foster, The Program

A promising biopic of one of the biggest sports scandals in recent history, that of Lance Armstrong and his dope-tainted legacy, upended by a breakneck pace of the worst sort, ridiculously hammy 'villains' in a film striving for realism, and very workmanlike direction. The only thing worth seeing in the film, as tends to be the case for many films he's in, is Ben Foster. He manages to make you sympathize with Lance Armstrong, which is an incredible achievement in itself, without compromising the character's brutal, aggressive mean streak. He portrays him as not a caricature but a man in brief moments of humanity, and thus makes the segments where he displays the deceitful, lying nature and artifice of his 'heroic' status all the more effective. It's spellbinding work which the more I think about it, the more it deserves to rank higher up my 2015 Best Actor ranking.

Marion Cotillard, La Vie En Rose

I was going to talk about Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth but I will wait a bit longer for that. Anyway, the film isn't bad, just not particularly good, structurally a bit messy, and lacks the needed personal style a biopic like this needs from the director. That it works for me is because Cotillard's performance works for me. Her performance as Edith Piaf cannot be praised enough, and I'm so glad she won the Oscar back in 2007; throughly well-deserved.

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Pompeii

As I've mentioned before, I enjoyed watching Pompeii, but it is a terrible film, no denying that. Most of its 'bad' qualities I enjoy for just how 'bad' they are, for example how derivative it is from the likes of Gladiator, or Kiefer Sutherland's Razzie-worthy portrayal of a Roman Emperor (supposedly). There is one 'good' quality to it, however, which I thoroughly enjoyed, loved even: Akinnuoye-Agbaje's performance as champion gladiator Atticus, every bit as upstanding and grand as the Finch variety, whose every word uttered from an inane script feels like something out of the glorious epics of olden days. Akinnuoye-Agbaje, whose long long name is the only reason I feel he's not a bigger name, gives an expanded version of Woody Strode's role in Spartacus essentially, and makes the film around him better in the moments he's onscreen by giving a vivid portrayal first of a career warrior, then finally of a badass who looks death with no fear whatsoever. If only they'd made a film about him.

Woody Harrelson, Rampart

A difficult to watch film because of how unappealing it is in terms of aesthetic and the fact that it tries to do too many things, examine too many things at once. Not to worry though, it's worth watching for Harrelson's career best performance as a dirty cop with a conscience lurking deep underneath. I need to re-watch to reevaluate, but it is at the very least an interesting film because of his performance.

Bryce Dallas Howard, Lady in the Water

Paul Giamatti is quite good in it, too, by the way, but I want to talk about Howard more. The film is a passion project for M. Night Shyamalan, who by this point was rapidly fading in people's memories as the guy who made The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, and would soon become he who directed After Earth, The Happening and Avatar: The Last Airbender among other masterpieces. It fails as a movie overall even though it has an interesting concept (an apartment complex bonds to help a water sprite who's washed up in their swimming pool return home), by failing to really establish a consistent plot thread, having some very indulgent moments of director's ego particularly in Shyamalan casting himself as a sort of 'writer saviour' character, and an unappealing aesthetic. None of the film's faults can be placed upon Howard, though. She's utterly convincing as someone not of this world, which is a harder task than it may seem, and with Giamatti creates a low-key chemistry that would've made a far better film than the overly amibitious failure it ended up becoming.

Hon. Mention: Mia Kirshner, The Black Dahlia

This is commonly acknowledged to be a 'bad' film, I personally like it a lot, and besides a dreadfully miscast Hilary Swank I can't find that much major to fault. The cinematography is beautiful, and the performance of Kirshner as the victim of the titular murder case, young actress Elizabeth Short, is spellbinding. Her actual screentime is very limited but her impact is huge, as through a few black-and-white reels of audition film and 'flashbacks' of sorts you get a full portrait of a deeply tortured soul.

Hon. Mention: Denzel Washington, Flight

The film isn't 'bad', so to speak, but it is extremely problematic. The first 20 minutes or so are fantastic, but afterwards it becomes a sloppy mess, not an entirely bad sloppy mess mind you, but just a bit too overly melodramatic and overly comedic in parts, that results in quite the uncomfortable blend of tones for the film. I actually like the film, but each time I watch it I spot more problems. Now this isn't the worst film Washington's been in where he gave a good performance. Safe House is a rather bad film that comes to mind when thinking about that sort of Denzel Washington film. But in Flight the whole film's success comes down so much to Washington. He holds it upon his shoulders. He carries it through a script that continuously tries to undermine him. And boy does he kill that final confession scene of his, some of the best acting he's done in his career. The film may be underwhelming in parts but he never is.