Worst Movie with the Best Cast?

Even Ford wasn't all that big, as I recall. I believe he was doing carpentry work at the time and sort of got dragged in to help read lines which ultimately resulted in him getting a part he wasn't really auditioning for.

Seems more like you hit the opposite end of the spectrum. Those movies were good despite a largely untalented group. Besides Ford, can you list any good actors to come out of those movies?

You are dead to me.

That's my favorite movie.

Episode I is the only one that should get a mention, and there are worse movies out there. It's just that it was Star Wars after all these years and the hope for it was so huge. Get rid of the albatross that was the kid actor and Jar Jar and it's actually a decent film.

I had to look up "The Visitor," and while I have no doubt it was a bad film, it doesn't appear to have had any actor of note in it.

Showgirls is awful, but you can't tell me a cast with Elizabeth Berkeley was good.

And no amount of looking at Halle Berry makes Catwoman watchable. (I also don't think she's a very good actress, despite having one of those Oscar statues.)

"Battlefield Earth" stands out because it did have a pretty decent cast, a huge budget, and a pathetically bad script.

And I just thought of another one:

The Cast: Kurt Russell, Peter Fonda, Steve Buscemi, Pam Grier, Bruce Campbell, Stacy Keach
The Result: Escape From L.A.

I'll see your Peter Cushing (Hammer stalwart and Dr Who impersonator) and raise you an Alec Guinness. Seriously the man was a legend, I'm still amazed they convinced him to play Ben.

Battlefield Earth would have to win this thread for me, but an honourable mention should go to Alien 3...wow they screwed up with that.

"Because it's dull, you twit, it'll hurt more!"

*swings around to glare at Captain Foamerang*

"And keep the stitches small."

Heh, my wife had never seen Robin Hood, so I made sure to have her watch it with me. She already liked Rickman from Harry Potter, but it's hard not to like him even more after seeing Robin Hood.

Even ignoring the Rickman addition to the film, I think Costner gets more hate for that film than he should. He's not the only one to play Robin without the accent, and he was more serviceable in the role than bad (ie, got the job done but wasn't amazing, either).

I guess I'll just agree to disagree on The Untouchables. I don't agree with all the averaged ratings on IMDB, but it's pretty strong on there (8/10, and I've seen movies that I thought were better get lower than 8). I know we don't all like ratings on the forums, but it is a pretty strong film.

To go beyond the ratings, I prefer the train station sequence to most action sequences you see in current films. Contrast the train station with its build up of tension and the ability to know what is at stake and see what is going on, versus blinding quick cuts and action that leave you unsure of what is going on, or not even caring much about who is fighting. And I cared for all the people in Costner's group. Costner does a likeable job in his role, and the story goes from initial failure, to success, to near defeat, to victory. It's a strong overall arc, and the train sequence and fight at the end have a good payoff to me after all the characterization and action ahead of time. I know I hated that one assassin quite a bit after what he did.

And as for Ocean's, I dunno, I got the impression that the cast was having fun with Twelve still, but Thirteen just... wasn't all that humorous and I didn't really care all that much about their opponent, either. That's pretty bad, considering Pacino was in the role, but I guess Garcia beat him to it, this time around.

Frogs starred Oscar winner Ray Milland and featured Sam Elliott, who's been in great movies from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to The Big Lebowski.

Also, I'm going to predict that the upcoming movie adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, which stars old pros Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, and John Hurt, solid character actors Mark Strong and Toby Jones, and up-and-comers Thomas Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch, is going to be a lugubrious mess.

Guinness made Stars Wars. Without his delivery, which drew on both his classic theater training and his comic talent, Lucas's dialogue about the Force would have taken down the entire film a notch or two. ("Great special effects, but what was that hippy philosophy BS?" instead of kids repeating, "Use the Force, Luke." and "These aren't the droids you're looking for.") Oh, and they convinced him by giving him 2% of the gross.

Please note that the merely serviceable Liam Neeson was utterly unable to rise to that challenge in The Phantom Menace, which, with its solid cast of Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Samuel L. Jackson, Brian Blessed, and Terrance Stamp, probably should be considered in this thread as well.

I'll give you Jones and Cushing, but aside from Vader, there's not much to be seen of Ben outside of the first movie.

And Mark Hamill? Really? Please rewatch the scene where Luke finds out who his father is.

Heh, one of my all time favorite movies. Everyone's cup o' tea? Nope. Bloated and melodramatic? Yep! But it's a clinic on great acting and well conceived scenes. I love it.

Supposedly Clooney is so embarrassed by this movie that even to this day he'll gladly give you money out of his own wallet if you ask him for a refund of the ticket you paid to watch that movie.

I can't really see how the original Star Wars trilogy was brought into this thread in the first place. At the time the first movie was made you had a mix of well known actors (Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing and James Earl Jones) who all had long careers before Star Wars was made and a bunch of newbs (Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher) who were basically unknowns before Star Wars. Besides I would hardly dump the original trilogy into any grouping that was related to the "worst" of any kind of movie. As you said I'd place the Star Wars prequel in this thread long before I'd put the original in it.

The list of actors I listed were "A" list people from the 50's and 60's. Most of them have a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and there were many awards won by them including 4 Oscars, a Golden Globe and many other nominations. But Hollywood didn't have the same pay scales they do today, so by the time of the late 70's, those performers were usually found in the latest mega-disaster movie or in an episode of "Love Boat" just to get a paycheck.

I wasn't using Showgirls as an entry into this category (although Kyle McLaughlin has been a decent actor), but as an example of a really BAD movie compared to almost all of the films others have listed.

I fully agree! Berry is very attractive, but not a very good actress. Catwoman is among the worst 5 Comic Book Movies ever made.

My understanding was that it was a Travolta vanity project due to his devotion to the Scientology "church." The book, oddly enough, was actually a pretty entertaining (if somewhat silly) read -- rather simplistic and very similar the the kind of "pulp" fiction popular when L. Ron Hubbard first became known as an adventure writer, long before he fabricated the Scientology "church."

You know, I didn't think that movie was as bad as the critics made it out to be. Maybe I had low expectations for it going in, but I saw what M. Night Shenanigans was trying to do with the material. Granted, I didn't think the movie was great or anything, but I enjoyed it.

And I can completely understand why people would hate it.

Beyond what I already said about the movie, you could say my biggest gripe with the film was that they set out to tell a story about a certain era, but apparently didn't realize they were allowed to make the movie in a contemporary style, aside from the violence. Therefore, it was more like watching a caricature of the story due to the bad dialogue, subpar performances, and directing style. Again, besides the violence, you could probably watch that movie in black and white and think the actors jumped into a time machine to make this film, and there's a reason people starting making movies differently.

As for the Ocean's movies, I guess by Thirteen I had already gotten used to the idea that Al Pacino was phoning in all of his roles, so the weak villain thing in Thirteen didn't bother me as much as the Julia Roberts thing in Twelve, plus they reveal at the end how they resolved everything so early that it's hard for the idea that the movie was unnecessary to not cross your mind.

That was what I got out of it, as well. And I do consider Scientology L. Ron Hubbard's greatest work of science fiction.

And I found Travolta and Cage enjoyable in "Face/Off" simply because the two of them, once they switched places, managed to pick up on each others' mannerisms and chew scenery through the whole movie. So Travolta IS capable of a decent performance (see also: Pulp Fiction).

When I checked out "The Visitor" on IMDB.com, there was something like 30 entries with that title. I didn't check back further in the thread to see which one you'd been talking about.

Movies missing from this list: just about anything by Uwe Boll. He always seems to manage to get good actors for his movies (i.e. Ben Kingsley in "Blood Rayne") and then film an absolute stinkfest of a film. The man has absolutely zero filmmaking talent. He's this generation's Ed Wood or Bert I. Gordon.

I used to really like "The Untouchables," but upon a more recent viewing it's a movie that has aged very poorly. This is rather unusual for a period piece. There are parts of it I still enjoy (the train station scene), but as a whole it doesn't work all that well for me any more. I don't think I could put it on a "worst" list, though.

I went into it thinking there was no way it was as bad as I'd heard. I was wrong. And it's not so much that it was "bad" it was just painfully boring and completely uninteresting. And this is coming from someone that prefers talky indie movies. It's the type of movie that can only come from a directors ego. It was a bedtime story he'd told his children and he figured that if his children liked it so much, the rest of the world would as well. Wrong.

The goal of the thread isn't necessarily to find the worst movie, but ones with the biggest gap between talent involved and quality of the end product.

It was passable until they started going into all of these supposed rules and roleplayers for her journey home; they kinda dumped all that at our feet at once and expected us to still eat it.

Because many elements of them are absolutely terrible and anticipate numerous problems with the awful prequels? A couple of wrong turns at any point in Star Wars' development* would have produced a turkey and ensured a very different course in movies.


* e.g. Casting Sylvester Stallone as Han Solo as Lucas once planned, Fox green-lighting Lucas's third draft of the screenplay instead of requiring more rewrites.