From Johnny Depp to George Clooney: 10 great actors who failed at being action heroes
Not everyone gets to be Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jason Statham, or Keanu Reeves and carve out a niche as an all-timer of an action hero, but plenty of actors have thrown their hats into the ring and made a decent fist of it.
Conversely, there are more than a few who decided to try their hand at the genre and failed spectacularly. As a result, it reinforced that the best course of action was to stick to other forms of cinema. Tom Hanks has never felt the need to mow down a small army of henchmen with an automatic rifle, and he’s been just fine, so it’s not even an obligatory box on the career checklist that demands to be ticked.
Some mediocre actors have made their name in the action genre, while plenty of immensely gifted performers have failed. It’s a tougher nut to crack than it would appear at first glance, but sometimes it’s a case as simple as a thespian knowing where their strengths lie.
As it relates to the following ten stars – all of whom are talented and well-respected names in their own right – the prospect of embracing their inner action hero is one that didn’t turn out too well.
10 great actors who failed at action:
10. Channing Tatum
Writing off any misconceptions that he was little more than a handsome and chiselled meathead, Channing Tatum has showcased an impressive amount of versatility, dramatic chops, and comic timing in movies like Magic Mike, Foxcatcher, The Hateful Eight, Hail, Caesar!, and Logan Lucky.
As part of his contractual obligations to Paramount, the actor eventually relented after turning down G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra seven times to make his full-fledged debut as an action hero. The end result was basically a live-action version of Team America without the irony, but what did Tatum feel about the end result? “I fucking hate that movie,” was his frank assessment in the aftermath.
Despite his maiden foray into gun-toting heroism going so horrendously awry, he tried it again with Roland Emmerich’s White House Down and promptly had his ass handed to him by Gerard Butler’s Olympus Has Fallen in the battle of the twin films. Neither of them were good, but it’s telling the closest Tatum has come to the action arena since was an uncredited cameo in Bullet Train.
9. George Clooney
It’s common knowledge that George Clooney holds an intense and burning disdain for Batman & Robin, with his intended breakthrough as a mainstream leading man going so tremendously tits-up that he spent the next quarter of a century openly trashing it at every turn.
However, what often goes unmentioned as a result is that The Peacemaker was released just three months after Joel Schumacher’s comic book catastrophe, ensuring 1997 would forever be remembered as the year that showcased beyond any doubt that being an action hero isn’t part of Clooney’s skillset.
Has he been in a straightforward action flick since then? No, no, he has not, although his charms were put to good use as the frontman of a breezy blockbuster franchise in the Ocean’s trilogy. Straight up running and gunning, though, he’s wisely kept as far away as possible.
8. Seth Rogen
As his Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy nominations can attest, Seth Rogen has many more strings to his bow than the guffawing stoner type that first shot him to prominence two decades ago, but don’t expect to see him roll up his sleeves in an action movie anytime soon, if ever again.
Casting him as the lead in The Green Hornet was curious, if only for the bizarre prospect of having Rogen headline an expensive and explosive blockbuster with Michel Gondry at the helm, but it would be fair to say the results were significantly less than spectacular.
Rogen would thusly describe the experience as “a fucking nightmare” after being chewed up and spat out by studio politics, a feeling reciprocated by anyone brave enough to subject themselves to the overwhelming blandness of The Green Hornet.
7. Ben Affleck
The career of Ben Affleck has experienced its fair share of ups and downs, but maybe it would be for the best if he were to focus solely on telling the stories he wants to tell and making the movies he wants to make because he’s clearly not cut out to be an action hero.
He openly lambasted Daredevil only to suit up as another superhero when Batman came calling, while he played his part in John Woo, exiling himself from Hollywood for 20 years when Paycheck fell apart at the seams and collapsed under the weight of its own banality.
Reindeer Games? Flop. Triple Frontier? Buried by the Netflix algorithm. Hypnotic? Sent out to die. The Accountant is somehow getting a sequel, though, even if the first instalment hardly blew away the lingering belief that Affleck should stick to the sort of films that won him two Academy Awards.
6. John Cusack
The gradual slide of John Cusack from being one of independent cinema’s offbeat darlings to a thoroughly unconvincing action hero is nothing if not bizarre, although Grosse Point Blank will always stand as evidence to the contrary that he can’t do it.
Then again, the classic crime caper was much more of a comedy, with things reaching such a nadir that there’s probably a lot of people out there who don’t even realise the once-popular star has been slumming it in a string of bargain basement VOD thrillers for longer than Nicolas Cage ever was.
Can anyone say in all honesty that they’re familiar with Cusack’s work in Arsenal, Blood Money, River Runs Red, Pursuit, or his random appearance in the Chinese fantasy epic Dragon Blade? If they are, then condolences must be offered because none of them are worth tracking down for anyone other than diehard Cusack fans.
5. Johnny Depp
He became a regular fixture of fantasy, but in terms of bread-and-butter action movies, Johnny Depp has only ever made one, and he even admitted it wasn’t any good.
The actor only agreed to appear in the real-time political thriller Nick of Time because Christopher Walken was part of the cast and John Badham was directing, and that apathy to everything else other than his co-star and the person wielding the megaphone is there for all to see.
Just like that, the era of ‘Johnny Depp: Action Hero’ was over for good, but at least Disney kept him ticking along through the likes of Pirates of the Caribbean and The Lone Ranger to a much, much lesser extent, even if his deliciously hammy supporting turn in Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico was a hoot.
4. Kevin Costner
Kevin Costner was just one of many ageing stars who looked at the success and resurgence Liam Neeson enjoyed with Taken, decided they fancied a bit of that, and then proceeded to show up in a terrible action movie or two.
3 Days to Kill rolled off the Luc Besson production line to impress nobody, while not even a star-studded ensemble including Gary Oldman, Tommy Lee Jones, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds could prevent the impressively unremarkable Criminal from flopping in cinemas.
Returning to what he knows works, the real Costner comeback began in earnest with Yellowstone, even if the jury remains out on whether or not Horizon: An American Saga will be more Dances with Wolves or The Postman.
3. Colin Farrell
Two-time Golden Globe winner and Academy Award nominee Colin Farrell is a phenomenal actor with range for days, but if he wants to carry on in such a rich vein of form, then he needs to stay as far away from being the focus of an action movie for a while, if not permanently.
His Jim Street in S.W.A.T. was the manifestation of the colour beige if it was a person, The Recruit saw him swallowed whole by Al Pacino’s overacting, Alexander was a disaster of epic proportions, Farrell himself didn’t care much for Miami Vice, and the less said about the Total Recall remake the better.
The easiest way to maintain such a fruitful set of recent credits is to keep on doing what worked, and burying himself under prosthetics to ham it up in The Batman was a much better use of his talents than putting him front-and-centre to scowl his way through another exercise in mediocrity.
2. Ethan Hawke
Ethan Hawke has always been a mainstay of independent cinema, working with some of the most distinctive talents in the business and notching four Academy Award nominations along the way. Still, those bills need to be paid somehow, which must be the reason behind his side hustle.
He doesn’t appear as though he’d make for an entirely convincing action hero, and when it was put into practice through a string of low-budget movies nobody bothered watching, that perception was proven to be entirely correct and right on the money.
There’s Hawke the actor known for lending esteemed support in a variety of genre-hopping pictures, and then there’s Hawke the journeyman lead of Getaway, 24 Hours to Live, and Zeroes and Ones, to name but three, which all slipped through the cracks, while those who did take a punt were left less than impressed.
1. Sean Penn
With two Academy Awards to his name, nobody can deny Sean Penn‘s talents as an actor, nor can they disagree with the belief that he’s always projected an air of self-confidence that borders on arrogance.
That – and the success of the aforementioned Taken – must be the only reason why The Gunman exists because, in its finished form, it’s a staggering waste of talent that seems to exist solely to stroke the ego of its central figure.
Penn literally brought in Taken director Pierre Morel to helm an action movie he’d co-written and was producing, complete with the requisite shirtless scene to show off his startlingly ripped physique. Javier Bardem, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone, and Mark Rylance all came along for the ride, only for The Gunman to implode at the box office and take a pounding for using a terrible movie as an excuse for Penn to try and reinforce his middle-aged machismo.
