Al Pacino
Okay, we love Al Pacino. He’s lost a lot of the restrained brilliance of the young Micheal Corleone, but even in the midst of some of the most overblown screen rants Hollywood has ever seen, Al is just so damn watchable that we don’t care. As long as we’re not watching Revolution (1985) that is. In perhaps the worst casting since Sean Connery as a Russian sub commander in The Hunt For Red October, Pacino plays Scottish-American fur trader Tom Dobb. With his son and stunningly bad accent, he stumbles through the American revolutionary war in the most jaw-dropping array of coincidences, plot contrivances, and bad editing of the decade. That this film cost nearly $30 million to make and took in less than $400,000 domestic is a testament to a bygone era when moviegoers actually cared about what they were spending their money on. Sadly, you won’t find any excerpts from this film on the Net as proof, but if you’re diligent, I’m sure you can find a copy in the dollar bin at your local convenience store.

Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe
No, I’m not talking about American Gangster. Long before this year’s wannabe classic crime drama hit the screen, Crowe and Washington wallowed in a fairly painful sci-fi cop thriller called Virtuousity (1995). Crowe plays a psychotic computer program that bullies its wimpy scientist-creator into helping it live outside of the virtual world and go on a killing spree. Washington is the only cop smart-or-is-that-crazy enough to stop him. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Sylvester Stallone’s Demolition Man (a similar film made the previous year) is far superior, since at least it makes no attempt take itself seriously. I’d like to believe that Washington’s phoned-in performance was actually an incredibly subtle and nuanced take that got lost behind all the amazingly futuristic giant-screen TV’s, but Crowe’s is indefensible. He actually seems to believe that bellowing incoherently while firing an automatic weapon is a legitimate acting technique. I guess when a film’s tagline is “Justice Needs a New Program”, you really shouldn’t expect much.

Robert De Niro
Forest Whitaker
Jodi Foster
Samuel Jackson, Ewan MacGregor, Natalie Portman, and Liam Neeson
Ralph Fiennes
Laura Linney
Gabriel Byrne
Ben Kingsley

This list has been severely abridged. To read the full list, view the original post at it’s source:
The Flixster guide to truly great actors in films that truly suck. (Flixster)