The Domino Principle - Gene Hackman, Candice Bergen, Richard Widmark and Mickey Rooney. Directed by Stanley Kramer. Waste of a talented cast on a mediocre script.
Maybe Once Upon A Time In Hollywood where they just gave very small parts to Al Pacino, Timothy Oliphant, Kurt Russell, Bruce Dern and others?
John Travolta and Bruce Willis in "Paradise City." It was among the worst movies I have ever seen. Ever. Unbelievably bad. Worse. Awkward, cliché-ridden scriptwriting, wooden, tepid, phoned-in acting, just a complete and utter waste. Like a contract-obligation last album for a music label except in this case a movie.
I’ve never seen Candy but I’ve seen Casino Royale several times. What a train wreck! Just look at that cast. Lots of wasted talent. The story of this disaster is legendary. Segments were filmed by different directors. Peter Sellars wanted to play Bond straight up and did not want the comic tone. He also didn’t get along with Orson Welles and refused to film scenes with him. Eventually, he quit the film before it was finished - that’s why his “Bond” is abruptly killed off. The movie is positively awful! But it does have the beautiful Barbara Bouchet portraying Miss Moneypenny…wearing a variety of sexy outfits
I haven't read the article because life is too short but this is like the bit David Letterman did bringing in an actual welder to critique Flashdance. You can't take a movie like Armageddon at face value. That's no fun. It's an action genre guy film. They even pause at least twice to recap the premise so the audience understands everyone involved knows it's stupid. This was one of my favourite movies for a long time. Great pacing, fun to watch actors chewing scenery, beautiful Liv Tyler, stuff blows up.
I haven't seen Popeye in many years but what I remember is the great cast, great sets, but also really inane songs such as Bluto singing "I'm mean, I'm mean, I'm mean." It might be the musical aspect that drags it down so much.
North Directed by Rob Reiner, hot off the heels of A Few Good Men. Written by the head writer of A Few Good Men (who would go on to write for Seinfeld) and a writer from SNL. Starring Elijah Wood, Jon Lovitz, Bruce Willis, Jason Alexander, Kathy Bates, Dan Akyroyd, Alan Arkin... I had grown up watching B-movies on the "Saturday Double Feature" on local broadcast TV. Old Hammer schlock, Corman and William Castle films, and other oddball sci-fi and horror movies. Most were pretty bad, but at least had Vincent Price chewing scenery, or a Roger Corman acolyte providing some effective special effects or cinematography, or at the very least an interesting premise or plot. North had nothing. Absolutely nothing interesting, or funny, or clever going on. It was terrible in every way imaginable. Bruce Willis was the least crappy thing in the film, and he's in it for maybe three minutes.
Glass Onion. Janelle Monae steals it, but there really wasn't much to steal. Daniel Craig should never have been saddled with an accent that he can't pull off.
Wow, I've never heard of most of these films. Which kind of proves the point... But I have the strange desire to watch Candy now.
I'll throw one out there: the remake of True Grit. I generally love the Coen Bros., even the ones that other people have mostly forgotten about (The Man Who Wasn't There, The Ladykillers). But this one bored the p!ss out of me.
This thread seems to deny the logic that a lot of these actors mentioned only had bit parts and were paid as such, so having their name on the credits doesn't mean they could have been utilized for more so it is hard to say their talent was wasted. If I see an aged star for only a couple minutes I would want them to be in the middle of an epic (non-war) disaster, which is the appeal of those movies. Plus, I care more about the talent behind the camera than in front. My biggest waste of talent movie is one of my favorite Horror directors and actors, Mario Bava and Vincent Price, teaming up in 1967 for a gothic horror mov.....I mean, a dire unfunny sequel to Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine. On that note, Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone (and Nancy Sinatra) completely wasted in Ghost in the Invisible Bikini. And even though I once liked it as a kid, the combination of Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and John Carradine should have resulted in something much better than House of the Long Shadows. The director Pete Walker was capable of making it edgier than the dull talky film we got. However, for all-star casts not amounting to much, it is a shame this cast was put in the kung fu yawner Jaguar Lives (1979): Christopher Lee - Adam Caine Donald Pleasence - General Villanova Barbara Bach - Anna Thompson Capucine - Zina Vanacore Joseph Wiseman - Ben Ashir Woody Strode - Sensei John Huston - Ralph Richards
Cats has to be the winner of this thread. Batman Forever and Batman & Robin - Both had great casts, but not good movies. Batman & Robin was a worse movie, but it didn't take itself as seriously as Batman Forever After the success of some bible movies with great casts, such as Ben-Hur (Heston version,) The Ten Commandments (Heston version,) and a few others, there have been some awful biblical and historical epic movies with All-Star casts, including some modern remakes. Too many to name from over the years. And while the movie Crash won all kinds of awards and had an All-star cast, I thought it was awful (my opinion.) Similarly, the movie Babel. Cloud Atlas is another one with an all-star cast that goes to waste. Many other examples I could come up with if I tried.
Yep, tried to sit through The Greatest Story Ever Told, and it really just felt like the longest. Max von Sydow as Jesus Dorothy McGuire as the Virgin Mary Charlton Heston as John the Baptist Claude Rains as Herod the Great José Ferrer as Herod Antipas Telly Savalas as Pontius Pilate Martin Landau as Caiaphas David McCallum as Judas Iscariot Donald Pleasence as "The Dark Hermit" (a personification of Satan) Roddy McDowall as Matthew Ed Wynn as "Old Aram" Smaller credited roles were played by Carroll Baker, Robert Blake, Pat Boone, Victor Buono, Richard Conte, John Crawford, Van Heflin, Angela Lansbury, Robert Loggia, Sal Mineo, Sidney Poitier, John Wayne, and Shelley Winters.
The 1940 movie YOU'LL FIND OUT starring bandleader Kay Kyser manages to waste most of the talents of Peter Lorre, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. Watch it and see . . . but prepare to be disappointed. I may have mentioned TENTACLES (1977-Italian) before, but this film really is a great waste of great cast. Sheesh! BAD with a Capital 'B'! I can sit through the 155-minute version of THE SWARM, which is not a good movie [but which is better than the awful 116-minute theatrical version which has such choppy continuity it's barely worth watching once], however I find TENTACLES even worse than "The Swarm" and it's only 90 minutes or so. Ugh! @finslaw: Was the dire sequel you speak of DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE GIRL BOMBS? (I could look it up but I like to go by memory alone when I can!).
If anyone has ever seen the 1948 biopic THE BABE RUTH STORY it's a cringe-inducing flick. Ye Gods! → I can only surmise the filmmakers were trying to get the movie completed and released while Babe was still alive so the movie paints Babe as a combination of a misunderstood, overgrown child and GOD ALMIGHTY. But now I have warned you about this sappy movie and you will know what to expect should you endeavour to watch it. There was talent there to make a good movie instead of a syrupy, mushy mess!
I'm sorry it bored you. This is one of my very favourite westerns of all time. It was so good in it's characterisations I read the book which amazingly echoed the Coen Brothers version. I will give you that Matt Damon is miscast but Jeff Bridges is dynamic and more than makes up for this goof(and Matt isn't terrible). The pacing is slow yes, but the movie gives a feel of the loneliness and sparseness and immediacy of death experienced in the west.
Some films are just bad and the actors get the heat for it undeservedly. As a friend of mine in the film industry said, "it is really difficult to capture lightning in a bottle. You can have a great, writer, director and actors but sometimes it doesn't matter". There is a movie I watched called The Funeral. It starred Christopher Walken, Chris Penn, Benecio Del Torro and a few other well known actors in Abel Ferrara's film. This film looked like it was improvised by the actors with the director letting them do whatever they wanted despite potentially there being a script. The actors looked like they were rehearsing and didn't realise they were being filmed. An absolute waste of talent on screen.
