Worst Actors - Eddie Murphy: Part 1

Just... Terrifying.
source: also.kottke.org/

As discussed in a previous article observing the career of Adam Sandler, SNL has been successful at turning out major Holywood stars.  Still, as is often the case, its successes are outweighed by its failures.  A vast majority of SNL performers have their run on the show, then fade away, rarely to be heard from again.  However, about once every generation or so, the series has one huge, breakout star.  In the disastrous 1980-1981 season, a young African American comedian joined the Not Ready for Primetime Players and became one of the show's biggest successes, seemingly overnight.  

Eddie Murphy’s run on SNL was a combination of classic hits and a few rare misses.  I would contend he is easily in the top ten best cast members of the shows history, most notably for his hilarious Buckwheat sketches (Buckwheat sings the hits in-particular) and what is arguably my single favorite sketch in the entire series’ history: White Like Eddie Murphy, in which Murphy (as himself) goes undercover to see what the world is like as a white man.  If you haven’t seen this, it is on YouTube, and it is amazing!

So, it sounds like this is so-far pretty positive, right?  Well, like many of the performers that have been and will be on this list,  Eddie Murphy’s career did not start getting really bad until later.  He started off as an edgy, funny comedian coming off a period in the 1970’s of comedy that was either overtly slapstick, or wry and self-aware.  There was really not too many comedies being released that held that nice middle ground.  The most successful comedies were more low-key (for the most part), as was the case with Harold and Maude and The Last Picture Show, then came SNL.  SNL’s contribution to comedy was essential.  It shocked, it broke down barriers, it put black and female comedians on even ground with their white male counterparts, and it addressed social mores and taboos with gusto.  It was brazen, and that is what made it great.

Eddie Murphy wanted to be a pop star... Isn't that cute?
Source: http://burningtheground.net

After three successful seasons on SNL, Eddie Murphy was already a Hollywood hit-maker.  48 Hours and Trading Places (my favorite Eddie Murphy comedy) were both released during his time on the sketch comedy show, and both were successful.  He began a pretty remarkable run in the 1980’s, racking up hits with Beverly Hills Cop, Coming to America and Harlem Nights.  However, as the 90’s came around, there was this strange washout of the 80’s, as though everybody wanted to just forget it happened.  Shows like Saved By the Bell tried to keep the neon pink, big hair and bubblegum pop alive, but I always hated that show, and I know more than a few other people who did as well.  No, the early 90’s had a cultural split.  Generation X took over and with them there was a new generation of comedies like Clerks and Dazed and Confused.  80’s film culture was more or less dead at this point. Most of the A-list comic actors of the 80’s had to adapt or fade away.  Tom Hanks and Robert Downey, Jr. became bonafide dramatic performers to cope, and they have had many successes since, but for the most part, things were not looking good for comic talents out of the 80’s.  Eddie Murphy was arguably the biggest start to fall due to this trend, coming off of a truly stellar run, he just stopped being good.  Another 48 Hours, Boomerang and The Distinguished Gentleman were all critical failures but moderate successes at the Box Office.  Then came 1994… oh, boy.

I would say that 1994 was the big turning-point in Eddie Murphy’s career.  It was a point at which he became cynical, and just started taking roles I guess he thought would earn him the most money.  Beverly Hills Cop III was one of the worst sequels of the 90’s.  It had a ton of hype surrounding it.  It was directed by John Landis, who also helmed such greats as The Kentucky Fried Movie, An American Werewolf in London, the aforementioned Trading Places, and Animal House.  It also was Eddie Murphy’s return to action comedies, which had been long-awaited by fans, and it was a well-needed respite from the hard drama that was good, but still saturating in the early-to-mid-90’s.

The movie came out, and just about everyone agreed it sucked.  The plot about a giant mascot theme park (ala, Disney) as the front for car theft and counterfeiting rings was about as interesting as it sounds.  The theme park setting was a clever idea, but not really used to any effect and Eddie Murphy just seemed bored.  Shortly after the film’s release, cast and crew began leaking bytes that Eddie Murphy was basically a pompous ass during the entire production, exercising typical Hollywood spoiled-brat behavior and a refusal to cooperate with Landis.  Murphy reportedly wanted to play the role straight, as though Axel Foley had grown up and out of his famous “wise-ass” persona.  Landis himself said that he believed Murphy was trying to make himself competitive with rising stars like Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes, casting aside his old comic stylings.  The result was a bland, boring comedy that did not have one funny or inspirational moment.  Landis said he “knew the script wasn’t any good” but he operated in hopes that improvisation and comic talent would help the movie rise above its weak screenplay.  It did not, mainly because the comedy just was not there.

Eddie Murphy had a little trouble getting roles after Beverly Hills Cop III.  He hit a slump that he would never be able to climb out of.  His films were still major releases, mind you, and they were still successful, but remember that whole thing about being more dramatic?  Well, that was a load of crap.  I chalk that up to Eddie Murphy just being an ass when he said that because he followed up Cop III with Vampire in Brooklyn, a lame horror/comedy that was severely-lacking in the qualities of both genres.  

He then, most likely out of desperation, signed on with Disney.  Disney has long been a career-killer and Eddie Murphy, though surviving Disney’s terrible run since the late 90’s (The occasionally-good Pixar movie notwithstanding), has never fully recovered.  His first film with the Disney crap-factory was the massive hit the Nutty Professor.  I hated this movie.  A lot of people found it funny but I found it obnoxious and just, well.. noxious.  Eddie Murphy can be a lot to take in, so when he’s playing multiple farting family members in fat suits spouting out annoying, loud shtick, I just want to find a high ledge and leap.  The main premise of the movie is fine, a fat: lonely doctor invents a serum that turns him into a slender player.  In the original, Jerry Lewis went from a nerdy dork to a player but, by the 90’s, Eddie Murphy was far too arrogant to play a nerdy dork, right?  Well, his character Sherman Klump (I HATE that name, by the way), was not really nerdy, just shy and embarrassed by his weight.  So, no, it isn’t the same thing.  I did not like the original Nutty Professor, and I certainly did not like the remake.

He followed that up with Metro, a by-the-numbers action comedy in the vein of Beverly Hills Cop.  It was alright.  It was certainly better than Beverly Hills Cops II and III.  Still, it was not a change to form for Murphy.  He voiced the loud-mouthed dragon Mushu in Mulan and went on to star in another dreadful Disney remake: Dr. Doolittle.

Talking animals!  Am I right?  Easy money!  Disney has long been the source for pure Hollywood cynicism and boy it does not get any more cynical than Dr. Doolittle.  This film preys on family audiences with the idea that, if we have animals run around and dub actors voices in the background, it will be funny, right?  No.  It wasn’t funny.  Still, because it was Disney, it starred Eddie Murphy, and it was a recognizable title for adults with kids, it made money.  This is exactly why Disney went through this remake binge with The Nutty Professor, Dr. Doolittle, and Flubber: Because the older audience of that time, who grew up on the originals, had kids now, and Disney was going to try to milk them for all they had while doing as little work as necessary.  Remember, at this time, Pixar was still young and Disney had not yet started to fully take credit for the fresh studio’s hard work.  Also, with Studio Ghibli still around the corner, Disney’s claim to animation dominance was sort of fading.  It was okay though, in a few years they would be able to consistently take credit (and money) from talented studios, stick their overblown logo before the film, and claim it as their own.  Disney!

Murphy went through a relatively uninteresting period after Dr. Doolittle.  He began to star in odd comedies like Bowfinger and Holy Man.  These movies were not good, and they represented a bland, soulless brand of Hollywood cinema.  They utilized the stick-popular-actors-together-on-screen and mixed that with the ebony-and-ivory formula, generating truly uninspired and uninteresting cinematic nothingness.  What’s worse is, they were essentially the same movie.  Eddie Murphy is a naive black outcast of some sort, who is exploited by a white guy who wants to use him to star in a movie/sell products through his ad agency.  There was very little to distinguish these two films, and very little to hold anyone’s interest.

Murphy starred in Life alongside Martin Lawrence, in which he and Lawrence play wrongfully-convicted men sentenced to life in a black prison in the first half of the 20th century.  It was another nothing movie.  It was, I think, meant to be a sort of spoof of the Shawshank Redemption, only it was a few years too late and played too straight.  It tried to be serious at times and these scenes just bogged the movie down in lame melodrama.

He premiered his short-lived animated TV series the P.J.’s about an apartment building superintendent, and starred in the dreadful Nutty Professor 2, which centered more on the Klump family than the actual plot.  It was terrible.  Showtime followed, which was another nothing comedy about cops working together while being filmed for a reality show.  It was bad and his co-star Robert De Niro just looked like he was sleepwalking through this tripe.

This ends part 1.  If it seems that I sort of knocked out a large chunk really fast, it is because I did.  Eddie Murphy’s 90’s run was bad, but nobody could have seen what was right around the corner.  We have yet to explore the darkest depths of this fallen star’s worst performances, so standby for the next post where we take a look at, in one single article, some of the worst comedies ever made by Hollywood.

Worst Actors - Shia LaBeouf

Shia LaBeouf is pretending to be sorry about
ruining the 80's for everyone.
Source: gossipalacarte.com

There are a few of actors that are currently working that, when I know they are involved with a film project, I avoid like the plague.  I have covered a few of these already but while I do really dislike actors like Adam Sandler and Katherine Heigl, I have seen movies that feature them that I have liked.  This is not the case with Shia LaBeouf, a former-child-star-turned-professional-douchebag who ranks high on my list (maybe even the very top) of the worst A-list performers of all time. It is really hard for me to pinpoint what it is specifically that I find so ineffective or flat out annoying about “The Beef”.  I can definitely point out what I did not like about his various performances.  It maybe his annoying behavior on screen, his voice, the fact that he is incapable of closing is freaking mouth!.. I do not know for sure what it is specifically, though. I wasn’t aware of LaBeouf as an actor until a few years into his career.  Still, I will start at the beginning with this guy, because I think it goes to the point of why he should be avoided like the plague.

Shia LaBeouf got his start in single-episode cameos in various TV shows like ER, the excellent-but-short-lived series Freaks and Geeks, and the X-Files.  He appeared in a few kids movies but none that were particularly notable (that is unless you count the re-release-dub of Studio Ghibli’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind).  His first recognized, lead role was on the Disney series Even Stevens, a show I have never seen and this I wear this fact as a badge of honor.

Shia LaBeouf is enjoying his time at a commune focused
on the worship of shawarma and the band Rusted Root.
Source: avclub.com

During his three-year run on Even Stevens, LaBeouf slowly began a rise in mainstream cinema, though all of the movies he was in were bad.  It started with the family movie Holes, based on the book by Louis Sachar.  The story involves a boy named Stanley who is wrongfully-convicted of theft and as punishment, chooses a work camp over jail time  When he gets there he and the other kids are forced by a corrupt warden (Sigourney Weaver) to dig countless holes in search of buried treasure.  The movie goes deeper than this primary plot with some intrigue about a family curse, but that does not alter the fact that the acting, by everyone in-general and LaBeouf in-particular, here was bad.  The movie was praised for its story but with film, story is only part of the larger equation.  

After Holes, LaBeouf had small parts in two dreadful sequels, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd.  Both films are famous for their badness, so I don’t think I’m breaking anyone’s hearts by simply calling them pieces of trash.  Still, unfortunately, LaBeouf kept on trucking.  He had a role in the by-the-numbers and mostly-ignored golf sports drama The Greatest Game Ever Played and a part in the dreadful action flick Constantine.

His next major movie was the film adaptation of Isaac Asimov's series of shorts: I, Robot.  The Hollywood adaptation of this thought-provoking examination of man creating life and his will being exacted on said life is a butchering to say the least.  Action movie cliches abound in this hot mess.  There are tons of ugly CGI explosions, Will Smith defying the laws of physics and LaBeouf, in a smaller part, shouting and screaming his lines.  I guess people really liked that screaming because that would become his default acting mode from here on out.

Disturbia, released in 2007, was a shallow, uninteresting Rear Window knock-off.  I would like to point out that some genius over at Dreamworks thought this perpetually-dumbfounded-looking, droning ass was a replacement for James Stewart.  Just.. let that sink in for a moment.  Disturbia was bad, but successful.  Somewhere along the lines the film’s success was attributed to LaBeouf and this put him over the top in the eyes of Hollywood.  However, in spite of Disturbia’s success, LaBeouf was already lined up for his worst role to date… and boy-oh-boy is it a doozie!

Shia LaBeouf's career simulator.
Source: tvrecappersanonymous.files.wordpress.com

The idea for a live-action Transformers movie had been floating around Hollywood for a while.  There were project pitches, press releases and rumors going back as early as the mid-90’s but it seemed like every time one party was interested, they could not get a producer, writer, director, or any combination thereof, to sign on.  Well, in 2007, long-suffering fans finally got the movie they had waited roughly two decades for.  The initial buzz was huge.  Steven Spielberg was lined-up to produce, the original Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen, was cast to voice the Autobot leader… and that’s pretty much where the excitement wore off for a lot of people.  A majority of the early fan-rage came out in flames when Michael Bay was announced as the director.  Bay’s distinct… style (?) … is widely regarded as one of the most horrid wastes of film imaginable.  Bay spent much of the 90’s working with blockbuster producer Jerry Bruckheimer, but that partnership ended shortly after Bad Boys II tanked.

Michael Bay flooded Transformers with his trademark: unnecessary comic relief.  These gag “characters” became more central to the “story” than the titular Transformers.  Countless sex gags, toilet humor and stupefying slapstick dominated every scene and every time the movie started to feel grandiose and epic, something utterly idiotic would happen, completely wasting what little effort was made to give the film a mythos.  Michael Bay owns about 80% of blame for this failure.  Spielberg gets 10% for his now-commonplace hands-off, just-sit-back-and-make-money approach and the other 10% falls on the cast.  Shia LaBeouf’s character Sam is thoroughly unlikable.  He talks to everyone like they’re pieces of crap, he screams at the heroes, he shouts every line with a guttural droll that makes him sound like he just tripped over puberty and he spends scene-after-scene standing around with his mouth agape, as though there is a stage hand off-screen who is there to toss him Cheetos between takes.  LaBeouf’s Sam, being the lead in this franchise, is the character we are meant to relate most to, yet he is so badly-written and such a tremendous asshole in all three movies that there is just no way I can.  I cannot see myself cheering this guy on.  He is the only guy in the history of the world who would actually be pissed at the fact that he got a nice car from his dad that also happens to transform into a freaking giant robot.  Am I missing something here? What is worse is I think this character was actually meant to be a Michael Bay proxy! (I feel so unclean right now)

Now, as much as I hated Transformers, I had to see LaBeouf’s next movie.  The Indiana Jones franchise is easily one of  my favorite film series.  Issues I had with Temple of Doom aside, the character of Indiana Jones is an iconic, important film character.  So, I was legitimately excited about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.  Then I actually saw it.

I was mad about Transformers, but I did not go into the theater expecting greatness.  At the very minimum I expected to be moderately-entertained.  So, imagine my surprise when I saw this piece of ASS!  Kingdom is the worst sequel to any quality film franchise I have ever seen.  I hate it more than the Star Wars Prequels, more than Rocky V, more than Alien: Resurrection. I hate this movie more than any of them.  Indy 4 is a complete betrayal plagued by indifference from the creative team and a money-grubbing George Lucas’ talentless hands scraping all over this bastard project.  Every little moment of awfulness in this movie reminds me why I hate major Hollywood.  It is everything bad about modern films in one, ugly, unimaginative, boring mess.  

LaBeouf is just terrible in his crap.  We see him swing through trees with CGI monkeys, get hit in the groin by tree limbs, shout incoherently and then, after all of this, they have the inflated, bright-red BALLS to give him Indy’s hat!  GO TO ALL OF THE HELLS!!!  Fan rage about this movie is nothing fresh or clever, I know.  It has been documented, and repeated, and removed, and reported and perma-banned.  Yet, you will not find a sane, intelligent defender of this movie.  Still, if you do, against all odds, please make sure this person cannot procreate.  Do everything you can as the fate of humanity just may depend on a single makeshift sterilization.  

With all the rage I felt over the crushing of a childhood icon, I still found the Transformers sequels to actually be worse!  Worse than Indiana Jones 4, people!!!  The second film, Revenge of the Fallen, suffered delays due to a WGA strike, which forced Bay himself to ultimately touch up the remaining scenes in the unfinished script.  Needless to say, Bay is no Walt Whitman, and when his awful, awful additions were put to screen, it became almost unanimous that Michael Bay was a shoo-in for a Razzie.. and he got one!  In fact, Bay was nominated for a Razzie for his directorial work on all three Transformers films, but Revenge of the Fallen was the only one to win.  I’m not going to dwell too much on Revenge of the Fallen’s endless misogyny and racist “humor” as that has been well-covered in hundreds of reviews online, but Revenge of the Fallen deserves its title as the worst of three entirely awful films.

Dark of the Moon followed shortly after and was met with equal derision from fans and critics, but, like its predecessors, it made money.  Dark of the Moon was not as bad as the other two, if only due to it cutting back somewhat on the sexism and racism and the recasting of the vacant Megan Fox with the still-bland-but-slightly-better Rosie Huntington-Whiteley.  The movie held on to Revenge of the Fallen’s co-writer Ehren Kruger but without Bay’s “additions” the screenplay was a little better.  It wasn’t good!  Not by a long shot! Cut me some slack, though, as I’m trying to dig a little gold nugget out of three turds here… it is not an easy or pleasant task.  

The reception of the Transformers movies was mixed.  They were widely successful, but fans of the original series (myself included) hated them and Shia LaBeouf was right in the middle for me.  Yeah, I hate Michael Bay.  I would call him dirt, except I kind of like dirt a little more than Bay.  Still, I cannot, and will not let LaBeouf off the hook for these movies.  If I called his performances as Sam “awful”, that would be dishonest, because I really could not believe a film character could be this bad.  Johnny from the Room is Rhett Butler by comparison.  I would take Halle Berry as Jinx in Die Another Day (coming soon, by the way) acting alongside Victoria Jackson in a stadium full of drunk vuvuzela players over Sam-I-Wish-His-Herpes-had-Syphilis-Witwicky any day!  He is, at least in my book, a strong contender for the worst character in any major movie in film history, and yes, he just may rank worse than Bella Swan or.. GASP!!! Jar-Jar Binks!

Okay… Deep breaths...

I cannot really comment on any other later performances in LaBeouf’s career for two reasons:  One: he has not had many roles of note since Transformers 3, and two: After seeing the Three Films of the Darkest Depths of Cinema HELL I could not take anymore of this talentless nothing of an actor.  I have seen good actors give bad performances.  I have seen terrible actors give good performances.  However,  I have not, out of all the films I have seen spanning over a hundred years of cinema, seen a major, A-list, Hollywood actor act as bad as I have seen from LaBeouf in ANY of his roles.  He is one of the worst actors I have ever had the misfortune of witnessing perform, and I am not the only person who feels that way.  At least, so it seems, people are catching on, as studios have been passing him up on major roles since the Transformers and Indiana Jones fiascoes.

Worst Actors - Dwayne Johnson

Not Dwayne Johnson.  Still, this picture is awesome!
Source: superbwallpapers.com

The Wrestler-to-Actor transition has been a rocky one.  In spite of that, Wrestlers are performers in their own right.  What they do is much like a very technical and occasionally-dangerous dance, and it takes skill to prevent injury when two-to-three-hundred-pound men are flying around a ring and smashing into each other and are slamming into the mat.  I’m not really sure why pro-wrestlers have had so much trouble taking off in Hollywood.  I would assume that, in most cases, it is a result of them not wanting to step back and take a smaller role, allowing themselves to be carried by better actors.  Some actors were just not meant to be leading men.

Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson was a hit during his run from the mid 90’s and onward in the WWF (which became the WWE in 2002).  He was considered by his fans as a quotable, likable and energetic performer.  It did not take long for his acting career to stem from his charismatic image.  This all began with the birth of the recurring character The Scorpion King in 2001.

The Mummy Returns was a sequel to the 1999 Steven Sommers adventure reboot.  The first film attempted to create an Indiana Jones-esque hero out of mediocre actor Brenden Fraser and was accepted by audiences.  The sequel, however, ruined the camp fun of the first by wrapping the story around an epic mythos that was really tough to swallow, and it all culminated in a climax that was so silly that even Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was laughing at it.  The Rock’s role in the film was in the prologue, following the backstory of the Scorpion King.  His performance was more or less non-existent.  He did little to add to the role and despite his considerable size he managed to seem smaller than the already barely-written role, due mainly to his lack of lines or any depth in the Scorpion King character.

The very next year, a spin-off (cash-in), was released entitled the Scorpion King, which was meant to clear up some of the more confusing elements of the second movie.  Instead, we got a typical and bland summer actioner where we can see how much work went into to making the movie marketable, but not actually good or visually-impressive.  The film was packed with the common things that make so many films of its ilk suck.  You had a bland, barely-acted villain, shallow and unfunny comic relief and a hero that was, while more fleshed out than his previous iteration, played like an irritated jerk who acted as though he just did not want to be on set.  Everything about the Scorpion King reeked of market-tested, committee-written cynicism.  It was an example of everything wrong with the major Hollywood studios.

Johnson continued his wrestling career while moving on to his next major film project: The Rundown.  Directed by Hollywood-hack Peter Berg, the Rundown was a vanilla action comedy with a story that was dumb and comic relief that sucked, as it almost always does.  Dwayne Johnson, however, was growing as a performer here, and comparing his performance in the Rundown to those in the Mummy movies, I can see where some people thought he may have a future as a leading man.  Still, Johnson suffered, as did everyone else in the project, from the fact that the movie was written by the guy who wrote Major League II and a director who would go on to make Battleship!  I don’t care if your movie is written by the Epstein Twins and starred Henry Fonda and Cary Grant, you are not going to end up with a good movie of you’re working with a director THIS bad.  Therefore, I attribute most of the Rundown’s failings to Peter Berg, not Dwayne Johnson.  

Johnson followed this one up with a slightly more serious performance in the completely unnecessary remake of the 1973 low-budget, post-western genre piece Walking Tall.  Johnson took over the role originally portrayed by Joe Don Baker, but here he was at least a little more likable, and that is one thing I will give the man credit for, it’s really hard to not like him, at least personality-wise.  The Rock is incredibly charismatic and this comes out in even his worst performances.  Walking Tall failed due to a rehashed premise that was adapted from material that was not all that good to begin with.  Johnson plays a war vet who comes home to a town run by crooks and dirtbags, so he runs for sheriff and cleans up the streets with the help of an old friend played annoyingly by Johnny Knoxville.  Wait a minute… Is that not similar to the plot of China O’Brien?  So, would that make China O’Brien a pseudo-remake of the original Walking Tall?  Wow!  I have seen WAAAAAY too many movies!  

Johnson had a small role in the awful retread Be Cool, which was a follow-up to the successful comedy Get Shorty.  The film’s plot is exactly the same as the first, just replace movie industry with the music business and that’s it.  It sucked, but the Rock did not have much to do with this movie.  He was, however, a major contributing factor to why his next major film project sucked so damn bad.

The Doom video game series has been around since the early 90’s and is fondly remembered as a superior first-person-shooter that has stood the test of time despite extensive improvements in its genre.  The film, like any movie based on a video game, pays almost no attention to the game’s plot (what little plot there is to begin with) and just has Johnson forgo his charismatic side altogether, instead embracing a brooding asshole named Sarge.  Doom was universally-panned by fans and critics alike and is widely agreed to as being one of the worst films of the 2000’s.  The film’s major contribution is first-person-shooter-cam, a laughable gimmick used near the end of the movie designed to tie the movie to the game.  Fans hated this stupid and pandering concept, critics were baffled by it and it has not been attempted in a major film since.. thank GOD!

It was around this time that Dwayne Johnson had attempted to completely forgo his moniker of “The Rock” and instead attempted to embrace a more serious film career, retiring from wrestling and focusing on his newer Hollywood career.  His next choice is both captivating and understanding, though it did not do his career any favors.  Richard Kelly was very quickly rising in the ranks among praised indie filmmakers after his mind-bending exploration of a troubled teen’s psyche in Donnie Darko.  Kelly’s earlier works also included a stylized telling of the true story of a female bounty hunter in Domino.  The captivating and nontraditional filmmaker’s next project, however, will create a massive rift between its very few fans and its avid detractors.

Southland Tales was a project that may have suffered from the fact that it was a little too ambitious on paper.  The premise is certainly interesting.  The lives of three people, an amnesiac actor (played by Johnson), a porn star and a paranoid conspiracy-theorist-cop all collide amidst the dawn of a devastating environmental disaster in Los Angeles in the near-future.  The story was layered and complex… maybe a little too complex.  Kelly has already made a name for himself by directing stories that were notoriously hard to follow at times, but Southland Tales was the last straw for most people.  Fans of the movie claim that those that don’t like it “just don’t get it”.  I, however, hate that argument.  It is pretentious and undefendable.  Southland Tales failed because it had a terrible cast, a messy screenplay and some strange directorial quirks like the overuse of a wide-angle lens and a strange series of chroma-key filters that often made the film appear dusty and unattractive.  It had little to do with the fact that some people may not understand the plot, because the plot is not really all that hard to grasp.  What is confusing, however, is how the endless list of characters and their often-unexplained motivations go unchecked and how seemingly-major subplots are dropped and unresolved.  

Shortly after Southland Tales understandably bombed at the box office, Dwayne Johnson signed the one contract that is most notorious for ending major actors’ careers: the Disney Contract!  He was hamfistedly shoehorned into cameo roles on many of Disney’s lame, teeny-bopper sitcoms and began appearing in uninspired sports movies, a trademark genre of Disney since the 50’s, but even more prominently-so since the early 90’s.  The first sports romp he was tossed into was the bland football drama Gridiron Gang, which was one part the Mighty Ducks, one part Lean On Me.  It was not a good movie, and I do not think anyone who worked on it, Johnson included, really gave a shit.

Next up was the Game Plan, a Disney cliche-fest about a playboy football star who suddenly learns he has a daughter and is forced to man up and take care of her.  It’s sappy sentimentalism at its most heinous and is filled with the typical emasculating humor these movies are so well-known for.  However, Disney was not done with making the Rock look like a complete ass just yet, oh no!  

After playing a minor role in the big screen adaptation of Mel Brooks and Buck Henry’s 1960’s hit TV comedy series Get Smart, he was thrown into another unwanted, unneeded Disney mess.  The film was Race to Witch Mountain, a reboot, of sorts, of a short-lived series of Disney films from the 70’s about two alien children who are being escorted to safety from pursuers bent on exploiting their supernatural gifts.  In the original films it was a crooked millionaire that was chasing the kids and their entourage.  In the reboot, the villains are a corrupt underground organization of sorts.  To be perfectly honest, I never was a big fan of the original Witch Mountain movies and this did not inspire much promise in me for this movie, so I passed on it.  I just found it amusing that Disney is so creatively bankrupt at this point that they are tapping into their dreaded 1970’s pool of films for material to adapt.  They’ll be at the 80’s soon, and I can just smell the CGI-riddled remake of Honey I Shrunk the Kids coming right around the corner!

After Witch Mountain barely cleared a profit things were not looking good for Dwayne Johnson and the roles were starting to dry up.  He had, by this time considered giving into pressure to return to pro-wrestling but was still hoping against hope, I guess, that he would land that one big role that would send him over the top.  It never came.  He appeared in the under-marketed Planet 51, which bombed… extensively-so.  It was a strange meta-commentary of sorts where an alien family, that lives in what appears to be 1950’s extraterrestrial suburbia, encounters a human astronaut that lands on their home world.  I can just picture the pitch meeting for this dreck:  “Get it!?  He’s HUMAN but on THEIR planet…  N-N-Now!  …  Get this..!  HE’S the ALIEN!!!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  Ha!  HAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!”  Still, his ultimate humiliation was just about a year away.

I have commented before about Hollywood’s fascination with emasculating alpha male action stars.  It is not really all that new.  However, in 2011, it hit an all-time low.  Hulk Hogan in a Tutu in Mr. Nanny looks like the Old Spice guy in a boxing match with a flaming grizzly bear riding a T-Rex compared to Tooth Fairy.  Oh, man.  Tooth Fairy is about a hockey player who is recruited to become a  a tooth fairy because Disney didn’t have anything else.  Well, actually, it was because he stole the dollar left under his girlfriend’s daughter’s pillow that was meant for her, then he tells her there is no Tooth Fairy.  His punishment is being a flying man with fairy wings.  Tooth Fairy was panned by critics and it basically made Dwayne Johnson look like a joke.  The movie made back its already comparatively-low budget but was not really all that much of a success.  The film was obviously meant to be an attempt to rekindle the success found in the Santa Clause, but it did not reach that level of popularity.

He had a small role in the action comedy the Other Guys and followed that up with the truly dreadful revenge/action/thriller Faster.  His career was not looking up to be honest.  In fact, it was looking more and more like he was just going to fade away.  He appeared in Fast Five, the fourth sequel in the inexplicably-expansive Fast & the Furious series in 2011 and then we got yet another unwanted sequel to a movie nobody liked.  Thanks, Disney!  Journey 2: The Mysterious Island had Johnson replacing Brenden Fraser’s lead in the first film.  I did not see it, but reaction was lukewarm, but the film made money, so it became clear that Dwayne Johnson could still draw an audience.  It was at this point that the likable but bland-acting Dwayne Johnson made a truly baffling career decision.

This next movie is going to require some explanation.  In 1994, a Florida man named Marc Schiller was kidnapped and brutally tortured by three men called the Sun Gym Gang, so named after their favorite workout establishment.  During his capture he was abused, mocked, his family was threatened, he was repeatedly burned with a light and was forced to sign over a small fortune to the three men.  After he agreed to sign the papers, and did so, they gang decided to murder him, setting his murder up to look like a drunk-driving accident. He was forced to drink copious amounts of liquor then the gang drove his car into a pole, an incident he escaped with his life.  They tried to kill him again by repeatedly running over the weak man with their car and fleeing.  Schiller survived still.  He took legal action against the men.  The story became a notorious act of violence in the Miami, Florida area.  It is an absolutely true story.  Schiller’s family was traumatized by the news and the ordeal as a whole.  So what does superstar asshole Michael Bay decide to do?  He makes an action comedy about the events!

Horrible acts of violence make Michael Bay soooo hot!
source: cdn.ientry.com

I’m not a prude.  I take no issue in adapting a story from a real-life criminal event.  Still, it is important to understand just how real and brutal these men are.  They are murderous thugs with no remorse and no wits about them.  In Pain & Gain, we get the three punks, played by Johnson, Mark Wahlberg and Anthony Mackie and their atrocities mostly played for laughs.  The film has been described as a “black comedy” but that’s bullshit!  That is Bay and Executive Producer Matthew Bruce covering their tactless asses.  This is designed to look like a shocking, violent action thriller, with a comic edge, and I honestly think we’re supposed to side with the Sun Gym Gang in this movie!  The film has defenders, even some major film critics liked it, but the fact that Bay would stoop so low as to make a movie meant for laughs about such a brutal crime astounds me.  I truly believe Michael Bay is just an idiot.  He is an incompetent filmmaker, he always has been.  He is also a notorious chauvinist, which comes off quite often in his filmmaking, Pain & Gain included.   Dwayne Johnson, like everyone else in this movie, just comes off as uncomfortable.  Like he knows he’s doing something very bad and is trying to just get it over with.  

Dwayne Johnson is certainly not as bad of an actor as Adam Sandler, Tyler Perry or Chris Tucker.  He is at least somewhat charismatic and he is able to exude some emotion and confidence under the proper direction.  His problem comes mostly in his poor choice of films.  I think, with the right talent directing and with a proper screenplay, we could see Dwayne Johnson show some real chops in a supporting role.  Maybe he could benefit from a role that puts him into a position of vulnerability without it being humiliating like Tooth Fairy. A performance where he has to actually act, not just stand there and look muscular, but where he is not required to carry an entire scene.  As it stands, Dwayne Johnson, as likable as he may be, suffers from not being willing to step aside for better work, taking what comes his way.  This sort of career model never ends well.