Movies That Were Ruined By Bad Acting

There are many ways to define "bad acting." Maybe a director feels that a terrible performance is one that's too dramatic. It's possible that another believes subtlety is the enemy, wants everything to be over-the-top at all times, and hopes all their actors emulate Jared Leto's prep for Suicide Squad and full-tilt into the method acting technique for the duration of shooting. There's really no singular way to put "bad acting" into words — we just know it when we see it. 

But it isn't just their reputations that actors mar when they take a truly unpleasant turn on the silver screen — they also often taint the entire movie. While some films end up battered but not broken by one bad performance, others aren't so lucky. 

From speaking in half-baked accents that pull audiences out of the viewing experience to completely misinterpreting their characters' attitude and failing to bring the same level of quality to their performance as their co-stars, these actors committed some sizable acting sins — and left even bigger black spots on their films. Here's a painful look back at some of the many movies that have been ruined by bad acting.

January Jones is a true talent. She stunned for seven seasons as Betty Francis on AMC's Mad Men, she charmed for 63 straight episodes of Will Forte's post-apocalyptic comedy series The Last Man on Earth, and she killed it in the 2014 drama film Good Kill. As the kids might say, we stan a skilled queen. But not every performance Jones has given in the past has been as unblemished as these — a claim her lackluster appearance in X-Men: First Class can corroborate.

Across the board, First Class was a smash. It turned a huge profit at the box office, and critics adored director Matthew Vaughn's handling of the famous mutant characters, praised the script, and fell in love with the heart-racing action sequences and thrilling musical score. What everyone hated, however, was Jones' performance as the superhumanly strong telepath Emma Frost.

Jones moved through First Class without any discernible emotion, taking the frigid nature of her character's name a little too literally. And despite Emma's inherent allure and mystique, Jones was neither a charming seductress nor a sinister mutant. For ruining X-Men: First Class, one watcher argued that Jones — whose real-life superpower Damon Lindelof once claimed is bad acting – "deserves to have her SAG card revoked." Ouch.

How to make one (1) Awful Take on a Legendary Hero-Outlaw:

1) Blend equal parts not-British-at-all British accent and shaggy wig that seems more "Malibu Beach" than "cobble-stoned alleys and atmospheric forests of England."

2) Coat in delivery that never wavers — not even in mourning, triumph, or concession.

3) Taste and realize end product's unpalatability.

4) Burn recipe.

Kevin Costner carried out those first two steps in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, in which he played the skilled swordsman to an impressively awful degree. Costner's "wildly inconsistent" execution of the character makes Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves "a positively painful experience" decades after its original release, and his barely-there accent has gone down as one of the worst in film history.

Maybe Costner, a two-time Academy Award winner, was experiencing a bout of amnesia when filming Prince of Thieves and forgot how to act well. Perhaps the armor he wore in the film was cursed, hexing Costner to deliver a ghastly performance. Or maybe his heart just wasn't in it. (After all, he did turn down the script the first time he read it.) Whatever the case, it's undeniable that Costner totally ramshackled Robin Hood. As one viewer fitly put it, "How anyone can think Costner was good in this role is a frickin' mystery to me."

A strapping lead with expert knowledge of ancient civilizations, loads of whip-cracking action scenes, dastardly villains, inspired set pieces, and more quotable one-liners than you can shake a stick at — these are the makings of Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. An irritating and annoying attitude, frustrating lack of chemistry with her love interest, and dramatic display of damsel-in-distress antics — these comprise Kate Capshaw's performance as Wilhelmina "Willie" Scott in the 1984 sequel.

A Shanghai-based nightclub singer who accompanies Indy (the always-great Harrison Ford) and his sidekick Short Round (an adorable young Jonathan Ke Quan) on their mission, Willie was clearly the black sheep — and Capshaw stuck out in The Temple of Doom in a similar way.

Though audiences have warmed to the film since its release (critics originally found it too darkly violent), disdain for how Capshaw acted in Temple of Doom has endured. For many, her "atrocious performance" is "one of the whiniest, most grating, most insultingly awful [ones] in cinematic history." Going without the same effortless talent as her top-billed co-star, struggling to create a palpable on-screen spark between herself and Ford, and taking everything 10 steps too far, Capshaw was "painful to watch."

She may have ruined Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but Capshaw didn't ruin her shot with Spielberg, whom she married in 1991.

Luc Besson's Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets had plenty going for it — namely its arresting visuals, its "bonkers insane" first half, and its extravagant, lush world filled with creatures beyond your wildest imagination — but it got far more wrong than it did right. Without a question, what weighed down Besson's adaptation of Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières' comic series Valérian and Laureline the most were its two leads, Dane DeHaan and Cara Delevingne.

On paper, Valerian is brawny and trustworthy, although not the sharpest tool in the shed. On the big screen, however, DeHaan played him with too much broodiness and not enough bite, a "Han Solo-type character with zero panache." Delevingne did the same with Laureline, the sweet but efficacious heroine who serves as Valerian's partner in peace-preserving missions and his potential lover. Like DeHaan, Delevingne was rigid and devoid of emotion, delivering all her lines as if she was "conveying her latte order to the Starbucks barista."

Independently, the pair gave pretty pitiful performances, but together, they ruined Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets with their laziness and lack of chemistry. Like the Chicago Sun Times' Richard Roeper said, "They're so wooden they could have floated forever in the waters near the sinking Titanic and saved Rose AND Jack."

There's always a risk attached to casting fresh talent in a feature film, but Clint Eastwood tapped a handful of untrained actors to star in The 15:17 to Paris, the biographical film that tells the real-life tale of the terrorist attack that took place on a Thalys train traveling from Amsterdam to Paris. Spencer Stone, Anthony Sadler, Alek Skarlatos, and Mark Moogalian all portrayed themselves in the film, which Eastwood reportedly directed using his "famous one-take methods." His "experiment in stunt casting" and interesting directing choices went over about as well as you might expect.

The inexperienced Stone, Sadler, Skarlatos, and Moogalian gave The 15:17 to Paris their best shot, but these men clearly aren't actors and were rigid and self-conscious most of the way through. Try as they did, the foursome simply didn't know how to recreate the day they stopped the 2015 Thalys train attack for a slightly dramatized silver screen translation, resulting in "mortifyingly bad," "painfully obvious" acting that made The 15:17 to Paris the worst film Eastwood "has ever put his name to."