Bad Movies saved by Great Actors?

Chat about stuff other than Transformers.
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Sunstreaker2
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Bad Movies saved by Great Actors?

Post by Sunstreaker2 »

Come on now, we've all seen a movie or two where the only highlight was an awesome performance.

Like Alan Rickman in that awful Kevin Costner Robin Hood movie.
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Post by DrSpengler »

I can usually sit through anything David Warner is in, which is good, because that guy was in a tooooon of bad horror movies. He doesn't save them, but he makes them worth sitting through. Like "Waxwork".

And he was probably the best actor in "Tron".
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Post by Tetsuro »

Flash Gordon?

Max Von Sydow, Timothy Dalton and BRIAN BLESSED!!!
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Post by angloconvoy »

Ah, movies which were saved by one great actor?

Because if I want to name any bad movie with a great actor I'll say anything with Nicholas Cage. He's a great actor, but he makes so many awful movies.

Flash Gordon was a great movie and how dare anyone suggest otherwise (also, you forgot Richard O'Brien.

Ooh! Big Fish. That movie was awful but Ewan McGregor was clearly having so much fun that I enjoyed it anyway.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Flash Gordon's independantly awesome, and probably still one of the most faithful 'superhero' movies ever. Certainly miles ahead of po-faced shit like Defenders of the Earth.

Just about anything with Richard Burton, who I think was in something like five good films and a hell of a lot of shite. His willingness to ham through Exorcist II is astounding, but Wild Geese - where he's paired with a similarly game Richard Harris, and neither can quite mask their clear contempt of Roger Moore - is the peak.

Venom plays the Klaus Kinski/Nicol Williamson cards. It doesn't matter if your giant snake looks like a bin-liner covered in algae when you've got talent like that on tap.

Steve McQueen, the Getaway, with an assist from Slim Pickens at the end. It's just the most ordinary bank heist movie ever with a shit-load of sloooo-mooo as Peckinpah eats himself, but it's got Steve McQueen equipped with a shotgun and Ali MacGraw.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

Surely it's Peter Duncan who saves Flash Gordon?

Timothy Dalton and Desmond Llewellyn between them manage to stop Licence to Kill being terrible and actually at times manage to trick you into thinking it's actually good (Dalton is also single handedly responsible for The Living Daylights feeling new and fresh despite being pretty much the same sort of film as the preceding 80's Moore Bonds).

Tim Curry in Home Alone 2, seemingly not in the same film as everyone else and completely nuts as ever.
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Post by DrSpengler »

inflatable dalek wrote:Tim Curry in Home Alone 2, seemingly not in the same film as everyone else and completely nuts as ever.
I'm glad you mentioned Tim Curry, because making garbage semi-watchable seems to be his special power.

I wouldn't have been able to sit through "Legend" if it weren't for him. And maybe "Fern Gully".
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Post by Sades »

The Kraken in POTC. SEA MONSTERS FTW.
angloconvoy wrote:Because if I want to name any bad movie with a great actor I'll say anything with Nicholas Cage. He's a great actor, but he makes so many awful movies.
I think he makes awful movies because he's a horrible actor.
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Post by angloconvoy »

For me he's either horrible or great, he rarely hits the middle ground.
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Post by Jaynz »

Tetsuro wrote:Flash Gordon?

Max Von Sydow, Timothy Dalton and BRIAN BLESSED!!!
It's a little unfair to speak of Flash Gordon that way, since it was deliberately at the quality level it was (it's as a soft-poke at the original Gordon serials, hence all the cheese). The Queen theme song should have been a tip-off to anyone expecting it to be anything more than it was.

It would be like bitching about the quality of Little Shop of Horrors and claiming Steve Martin was its saving grace. When someone says that (and there were people that were), Then you're missing the point.
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Post by Jaynz »

It's a little harder for me to pick through movies, but TV is a lot easier.

Third Rock from the Sun was repeatedly saved from being crap thanks to the performances of Jane Curtain and John Lithgow. (Hell, even Shatner had a ball with it in his five appearances). A lot of the scripts of that show were pretty god-awful if it weren't for the deliciously deliberate over-the-top performances.

Friends choked down some really bad episodes and story-lines in many places, which were thankfully saved by solid performances from Matthew Perry and Courteney Cox. (Two cast members who were woefully under-appreciated, particularly when compared to the overblown Ross-n-Rachel story and the too-stupid-to-live antics of Joey and Phoebe.)

Star Trek, surprisingly, owes a lot of its strength to William Shatner's interplay with Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley. Yes, many people remember the cheese (E PLEB NEESTA!) more than the more solid performances, but watch episodes like "Trouble with Tribbles" and "City on the Edge of Forever" and it's obvious that it's Shatner that really 'sells the show' more than anything else.

And, to bring this full circle to this board, I would have to cite the original Transformers owing an awful lot of its success to the great voice talents of Peter Cullen and Chris Latta. The solid voice acting really made a difference in the show's quality compared to other animated series at the time. Would even "More than Meets the Eye" work if the voice work had sounded like the then-par-for-the-course efforts like Superfriends?
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Yeh, compared to most other shows I've seen Transformers has an excellent voice cast. There are a few wobbles (some of the season 2 cars overlap a bit on the whiny pedantic voices), but for a lot of the cast there's a distinct effort to make everyone sound different - thought's gone into processing, speech patterns and the like on many. Compared to shows with a similar cast (what are there, 50 TFs in a season typically? It's high even for a toy cartoon) such as Gobots or GI Joe and it's superb, and can really patch over gaps in characterisation - e.g. Hoist's lines are greatly helped by the jolly voice he gets, Powerglide's by the intention OTT cheese and so on.

You only have to watch things like the Star TV dub to realise what a massive difference they make - the names aside, the translation is pretty good, but with no effort put into the voices, it's all dull and flat. Ditto on Gobots, were for most characters again it's just an actor reading the lines in a normal voice with a little processing thrown in.

Flash Gordon is intentionally camp. Queen. Set designs ripped from porn spoof Flesh Gordon. Brian Blessed dressed as a valkyrie. The line "Flash, I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the Earth". Ornella Nuti being whipped. Klytus briefing his guards on how to counter American football moves. Topol. These are not things that are intentionally put in a film that's meant to be taken seriously. Shame no-one told Dalton, really, though his grim performance fits brilliantly precisely because it's miles off the tone of the rest of the film - Barin always looks like he's about to lose his temper and tell everyone else to stop pissing around and take things seriously.

God, I hate Lisa Kudrow. Always found Friends to be amiable viewing for the most part, if rarely all that funny, but her strands always felt like such forced nonsense.
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Post by Sunstreaker2 »

Oh yeah, another example of great acting (or should I say overacting) is Jeremy Irons in the Dungeons and Dragons movie.

He's hilarious in that.
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Post by Cliffjumper »

Sades wrote: I think he makes awful movies because he's a horrible actor.
I dunno, I find he's a good fit for a lot of the stuff he's in - just right for the Rock and Con Air, and as psycho Elvis in Wild at Heart. While he turns The Wicker Man from another diabolical Hollywood remake into a hilarious diabolical Hollywood remake.



Plus, he wants cake.



World would be a less funny place without him, for sure.
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Post by Sades »

I've seen both of those... I'm not entirely sure where or when, though. The last video=hypnotic animated boobies. :o

You're saying things I've heard said in the past by other people, and I have no real counter- If I've seen any film he's been in that I've enjoyed, I no longer remember it (asides from Ghost Rider, but that was because it was shit of the "entertaining" variety). At some point, I'll have to watch one of them thar films and see if I hate him any less in it.
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Post by Sunstreaker2 »

This horrible B-horror movie called "Succubus: Hell Bent" has one tiny upside.

Gary Busey. As a demon hunter.

It's amazingdiculous.
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Post by inflatable dalek »

As we're now including TV, I watched the first episode of The Persuaders... sorry, that's The Persuaders! with a friend and a few beers on Saturday. Because I'm rock and roll.

The script was barely there, it was insanely sexist even by the standards of the time (whilst I might let off the two leads initial Tony Stark style perving as a set up for their growth over the series- though I'll be surprised if there's less of it from now on- that doesn't excuse the plot being based around them having to follow a bikini clad woman around and stare at her arse intensely) and there's what feels like a three hour car race set to soft core porn music.

But, Roger Moore and Tony Curtis are brilliant. Funny, cool, and brimming from the sort of confidence you can only get from, respectively, having spent the previous decade as a massive TV star and having shagged Marilyn Monroe. According to the accompanying booklet Curtis basically ad libbed all his lines (due to issues with both how the British writers were handling American dialogue and wanting to make it funnier), with Moore being game to play the straight man and bring the scene back to where it needs to go. You can tell because all their lines are about 500% better than anyone elses. It's actually amazing to read that Lew Grade seriously tried to continue the show without Moore when he got Bond with another Brit before Curtis bailed as a result of the failure in America inspired budget cuts. It would never have worked.
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Post by Jetfire »

Sades wrote:I've seen both of those... I'm not entirely sure where or when, though. The last video=hypnotic animated boobies. :o

You're saying things I've heard said in the past by other people, and I have no real counter- If I've seen any film he's been in that I've enjoyed, I no longer remember it (asides from Ghost Rider, but that was because it was shit of the "entertaining" variety). At some point, I'll have to watch one of them thar films and see if I hate him any less in it.


I think Nic Cage is simply an acrtor who is awful in abd stuff but when given a good part he is brilliant (Leaving Las Vegas, Con Air). He is simply an actor who is the material.
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Post by Jetfire »

On topic, The Cannonball Run works simply beacuase it's actors make it work. It's a intentionally cheesy script with a bunch of barely 2d sterotypes but the whole cast gets it perfectly playing it both cheesy and natural.

I recall a film called Rat Race with John Cleese which tried that type of film and showed how easily that concept can fail if too forced, the actors go over the top in an unfunny manner or your not Roger Moore.

On that note a number of Moore's Bond films work as entertainment despite being cliched bullshit because Roger Moore never took it seriously but never went OTT and fortuantluy he was often paired agaisnt some of the series better villians, Moonraker being what is technically an awful film being perfectly watchable. The fact it has a super score helps too.

I seem to recall A Few Good Men being dull as ditchwater without Jack Nickleson saving the film with minimal screen time.
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Post by angloconvoy »

Yay, Nic Cage has derailed the thread. With me I like him for the same reason I like Ewan McGregor, whatever they do, even if it's clearly out of their comfort zone or even if it's clearly rubbish, I've never seen either of them phone it in.
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