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Home > Blogs > Sir Critic on Cinema > Archives > 2008 > April > 02 > Entry
To heck with quality, where’s my money?
Those eternal ranklers … uh, I mean rankers of all things pop culture, Entertainment Weekly, came up with yet another list, this time of the most egregious “I only did it for the money” performances. I’ll be blunt: many of their choices are flat-out lazy and/or wrong.
Every list of theirs inspires disagreement to some degree, but I can’t recall another list of theirs that inspired so many “Oh, come ON” reactions. Such as:
Sean Connery in Never Say Never Again: Rubbish, as the Brits would say. The movie has its problems, but Connery’s reprise as 007 was NOT one of them. A better choice would be The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in which he looked like he was bored out of his mind. Sad thing is, that looks like it’s going to go down as his last film.
Ben Affleck in Paycheck: They went for the obvious joke considering the movie’s title, but it’s still the wrong choice. For one thing, I can’t fault a guy for wanting to work with John Woo, even if the movie didn’t turn out so great. The correct choice should have stuck out like stale fruitcake. C’mon, guys, Surviving Christmas!
Laurence Olivier in Clash of the Titans: Now that’s just mean, man. That movie’s too much fun to single Sir Larry out. I’d go back a year and nominate his perf in The Jazz Singer remake. Why would anyone appear in THAT folly except for money?
Marlon Brando in Superman: You have GOT to be kidding me. Yeah, there was an insane amount of publicity about the fact that Brando got paid millions for about 15 minutes of screen time. It’s certainly not a great performance, but at least he seems to be trying - which is more than you can say for his performance in Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, which inspired the classic Roger Ebert line: “Brando’s phoned in performances before, but this was the first time I wanted to hang up.”
Robert De Niro, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle: EW isn’t the only outlet that goofs up by picking on this performance. I’ve seen several people rake De Niro over the coals for daring to do something not as dignified as Travis Bickle or Jake La Motta. They’re all wrong. You can talk all you want about whether the gag works, but it’s NOT a paycheck job. De Niro’s company produced the movie, and he’s a Rocky and Bullwinkle fan. I’m not going to slam him for trying to have a laugh.
However, I WILL fault him for appearing in that piece of junk known as Hide and Seek, in which he played a psycho who was after Dakota Fanning. Seriously - what was De Niro doing in a movie directed by the hack who made Swimfan?
Other choices left off the list:
Edward Norton, The Italian Job: The 2003 remake was a lot of fun, except for one thing: the usually reliable Norton moped through the movie, making it clear he did not want to be there, while everyone else around him was having a ball.
Bruce Willis: Armageddon: Hey, I can’t blame him for looking like he wanted to be anywhere but on a Michael Bay set. I had a headache too.
John Travotla: Everything he’s done since 2000, save for Ladder 49, A Love Song for Bobby Long and Hairspray.
What “Hey, they were paying me” performances would you add to the list?
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Lists
Comments
By SRCputt
April 3, 2008 4:28 PM | Link to this
As for Lohan, what about Just My Luck? Rich, even if Lohan isn’t any good in PHC (and I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know) no one worked with Altman for the money, because there wasn’t much. Actually, her performance might be a candidate for a different topic, bad performances in good films. As for Gooding, I won’t pick on Snow Dogs, but Daddy Day Camp was a major mistake, and Boat Trip is best forgotten. A subset of this topic: any Uwe Boll film has several candidates. Since Bloodrayne is the one of his I’ve seen, I will mention Ben Kingsley, who was horrible. And in a similar role, Jeremy Irons was terrible in Dungeons and Dragons.By Rich
April 3, 2008 10:12 AM | Link to this
No doubt Lohan was doing the “PHC” movie essentially because it was directed by Altman — and I’m also sure she didn’t get huge $$$ for it, as you noted — but her performance was about as flat as any I’ve ever seen. I don’t particularly dislike her, either — she is talented, and has been good in many other films. Maybe my expectations were “off”, but in the scenes where she was interacting with Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin, she seemed completely disconnected and unemotional, particularly in comparison to Streep, who was almost over-the-top in her performance. I guess my comments aren’t entirely appropriate, though, since you did premise this on “going for an easy payday”. Getting back that theme, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who’s blown a promising career more than Cuba Gooding Jr., choosing mostly wrong vehicles and (evidently) grabbing for $$$. His recent film choices have been almost uniformly awful — but no doubt the pay has been good for an Oscar winner from 1996. Yes, he has been in “Men of Honor” and “American Gangster”, but you also have “Snow Dogs”, “Boat Trip”, “Daddy Day Care” and others. Ugh.By Sir Critic
April 2, 2008 9:07 PM | Link to this
As a longtime defender of Lohan’s, I can’t agree, Rich - I thought she was fine. Plus, if you were cast in an Altman film, you weren’t doing it for the money. However, she does have another film that’s really inexplicable - a little flick called “I Know Who Killed Me.”By Rich
April 2, 2008 4:59 PM | Link to this
How about Lindsay Lohan in 2006’s “Prairie Home Companion”? She appeared to be in a completely different movie than the rest of the cast — never connected at all. I know some actually praised her performance, but it completely escaped me!By SRCputt
April 2, 2008 1:45 PM | Link to this
Norton and Willis are literally accurate, as both were dictated to do those films to fulfill multi-picture deals they signed. Remember a decade ago when Whoopi Goldberg was sued to force her to do a movie called Theodore Rex? Then the film set a record for the most expensive movie to go straight to video. One of the reasons is Whoopi’s eyes scream “get me out of here” throughout the film.