The 10 worst lines of dialogue in movie history
Excluding the entire silent era and the occasional experimental showcase for obvious reasons, dialogue is one of the most important elements in creating a good, great, and/or classic movie.
Whether it’s memorable zingers, instantly iconic monologues, soundbites that enter the public consciousness and refuse to leave, one-liners for the ages, or prose so verbose it lingers in the memory long after the credits come up, crafting an impeccable screenplay is an art form.
Of course, not every aspiring writer is bestowed with the gift of having two characters exchange words in a fashion reflective of how human beings actually talk to each other, with cinematic history littered with clangers ranging from the excruciating to the cringeworthy. Sometimes, a great actor or a strong performance can elevate nauseating wordplay above the realm of the awful, but those fleeting instances tend to be the examples that prove the rule.
As Harrison Ford famously said to George Lucas on the set of Star Wars, “You can type this shit, but you can’t say it,” and rarely has that been shown to be more true than in the following ten lines of dialogue that conspired to scrape the bottom of the cinematic barrel.
The worst dialogue in movie history:
10. Hard to Kill (Bruce Malmuth, 1990)
“I’m gonna take you to the bank, Senator Trent. To the blood bank.”
It may have only been his second feature, but in many ways, Hard to Kill is the quintessential Steven Seagal vehicle based on the number of preposterous boxes it ticks.
Does he play a law enforcement official with a ridiculous name? As internal affairs detective Mason Storm, yes, he does. Is the plot nonsensical? After being shot and rendered comatose for seven years before awakening to seek revenge on the person responsible for the death of his wife, yes, it is.
Is there groan-inducing dialogue delivered without a semblance of acting ability and a completely straight face that belies the inherent stupidity of the words coming out of his mouth? After hearing William Sadler’s corrupt villain say, “you can take that to the bank”, his retort – complete with thunderous musical refrain – was one for the history books.
9. Jupiter Ascending (The Wachowskis, 2015)
“Your Majesty, I have more in common with a dog than I have with you.”
Ambition is certainly something on which the Wachowskis can never be faulted, but their ability to craft memorable dialogue seemed to evaporate after The Matrix brought a cavalcade of one-liners to the forefront of pop culture, with sci-fi misfire Jupiter Ascending the biggest offender.
It was a huge swing on its own to craft a gargantuan intergalactic epic with its own bespoke mythology, but trying to further the romance between Mila Kunis’ Jupiter Jones and Channing Tatum’s Caine Wise fell laughably flat. She’s genetically identical to a cosmic matriarch destined to rule the cosmos, and he’s a genetically engineered soldier who is half-dog, so it was always going to be tumultuous.
Still, when trying to put that point across, Tatum solemnly declares that him being part-canine (it’s kind of in the name) presents an insurmountable obstacle. Her response? “I love dogs. I’ve always loved dogs.” Not quite a star-crossed romance for the ages.
8. The Brothers Bloom (Rian Johnson, 2008)
“I think you might have a really big load of grumpy petrified poop up your soul’s ass.”
Despite a vocal number of Star Wars fans suggesting otherwise, Rian Johnson is a very good writer, as evidenced by his Academy Award nominations for both Knives Out movies. However, The Brothers Bloom often borders on self-satisfaction and overwritten smugness, with Rachel Weisz’s Penelope Stamp the biggest offender in one particularly cringy exchange.
Attempting to sum up Adrien Brody’s Bloom Bloom, she suggests that “I think you’re constipated, in your fucking soul.” Doubling down on the faecal comparison, she then elaborates with a soundbite that was presumably intended to come across as offbeat and quirky but instead turns out as a line ironically similar to the lodged turd she was comparing his soul to in the first place.
7. Armageddon – (Michael Bay, 1998)
“He’s got space dementia.”
Michael Bay’s Armageddon has such a loose grip on facts and reality that Nasa has taken to treating it as a joke, with the organisation showing the film during its management training programme, with the candidates tasked to point out all of the errors they find, and there are many.
When Steve Buscemi’s character pulls a gun, he’s incredulously asked what he’s doing with a gun in space, which is fair enough, all things considered. Fortunately, there’s a medical explanation – at least within the context of Armageddon – because he’s dealing with the highly specific affliction William Fichtner intones as “space dementia”.
That’s the only explanation given, and Fichtner does his best to sell the gravity of the situation by maintaining a furrowed brow, but real scientists and astronauts were presumably left either scratching their heads or rolling on the floor in fits of laughter.
6. The Postman (Kevin Costner, 1997)
“You’re a godsend. A saviour!” “No, I’m just the Postman.”
After his first feature as director became a box office sensation that secured him Academy Award wins for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ amongst seven victories in total, Kevin Costner hoped the Dances with Wolves lightning would strike twice when he pulled triple duty as star, producer, and director of The Postman.
Instead, the post-apocalyptic failure was a flop of epic proportions that blew a hole in his career that took years to recover from, in addition to sweeping the board and emerging triumphant in all five of the categories it was nominated for at the Golden Raspberry Awards. Self-serious, portentous, and inescapably dull, Costner’s hubris even extended to the ludicrous dialogue he found himself caught up in.
Roberta Maxwell’s Irene March anoints him as a messianic figure, but for the title hero, he’s just a guy who delivers letters, albeit one who instils an entire country with renewed hope simply by wandering around and handing over the mail.
5. X-Men (Bryan Singer, 2000)
“Do you know what happens to a toad when it’s struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else.”
Both scientifically and factually accurate while being thunderously stupid at the same time, the superhero genre hadn’t quite mastered the art of the witty comeback when Bryan Singer’s X-Men first gave the flagging medium a shot in the arm at the turn of the millennium.
Anyone wondering if there were any bespoke side effects that applied specifically to amphibians upon being struck by a bolt of lightning would have been left crushingly disappointed, with Halle Berry’s Storm offering a reminder that toads – which clearly applied to their mutant counterparts, too – simply got frazzled and nothing more.
4. Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (George Lucas, 2002)
“I don’t like sand. It’s coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere.”
In retrospect, it’s borderline genius that Obi-Wan Kenobi placed Luke Skywalker in the care of his aunt and uncle and himself went into quiet exile on Tatooine following his climactic showdown opposite Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith because Darth Vader had a very good reason for staying as far away from a planet covered in sand as possible.
Not only is it coarse, irritating, and gets everywhere, but on an emotional level, it was a formative period of his budding romance with Padme Amidala, who died right before he was rendered a legless and extra-crispy wreck at the hands of his former mentor in the fiery bowels of Mustafar.
That being said, George Lucas still shouldn’t be excused for scripting such sorry character-driven exchanges, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that his talents as a world-building creative mastermind were fittingly light years ahead of his abilities to craft dialogue that was anything less than wooden.
3. Gigli (Martin Brest, 2003)
“It’s turkey time! Gobble, gobble, gobble.”
Martin Brest hasn’t directed a movie since the notorious dud that helped extinguish the flames of Bennifer V1.0, admitting to Variety that he can’t even call it by name when reflecting on “the G movie,” which he called “a ghastly cadaver.”
There are innumerable things wrong with Gigli, and the script is just one of them, but having Jennifer Lopez’s character display that she’s less than a cunning linguist when suggesting the act of fellatio is without a doubt one of its most egregious cardinal sins.
The star and Ben Affleck eventually got back together and made a much better fist of their relationship the second time around, but watching Gigli even once is more than enough for anyone who’s had to bear witness to one of the worst movies in history, with the director one of its chief detractors.
2. Fifty Shades of Grey (Sam Taylor-Johnson, 2015)
“I’m fifty shades of fucked up.”
For reasons better off left unexplained, the Fifty Shades trilogy earned over a billion dollars at the global box office to transform a literary phenomenon into a cinematic one, even if the repeated sultry utterances made by Jamie Dornan’s Christian Grey were about as titillating as taking the bins out in the midst of a torrential downpour.
Author E. L. James was hardly a world-renowned orchestrator of elite-level prose, but writer Kelly Marcel’s previous screenwriting credit in Saving Mr. Banks did showcase a penchant for adaptation. Tragically, the last thing the target audience wanted out of Fifty Shades was dryness, but that’s precisely what the dialogue delivered.
After dropping the bombshell that he is, in fact, “fifty shades of fucked up”, the only thing missing was for Dornan to turn towards the camera and wink while holding a hardcover copy of the source novel in the middle of the frame, like the product placement sequence from Wayne’s World, except not as sexy.
1. Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)
“It must be weird not having anybody cum on you.”
It’s hard to know where to even begin with Showgirls, which obliterated star Elizabeth Berkley’s hopes of a mainstream Hollywood career and facilitated Paul Verhoeven’s slip from the top of the industry’s directorial ladder in one fell swoop, with its paltry ticket sales and critical evisceration highlighting how the old saying of “controversy creates cash” doesn’t always ring true.
Having penned the filmmaker’s Basic Instinct, scribe Joe Eszterhas netted a cool $2million payday in the hope Showgirls would capture the same lightning in a bottle, only for the end result to arrive bearing one of the worst screenplays to have ever been given the go-ahead to be made as a feature film.
The list of execrable dialogue is unending from start to finish, but Robert Davi’s Al Torres takes the cake with his continuing – and questionably unsettling – obsession with bodily fluids. He makes at least three overtly ejaculatory references throughout, which kind of makes sense given the salacious storyline, but his delivery makes it exponentially more harrowing than it was surely intended to be.
