Five acting performances so bad they’re actually genius

Saffron Burrows – Dr Susan McCallister (Deep Blue Sea, 1999)

In Deep Blue Sea, Saffron Burrows plays Dr Susan McCallister, a scientist working on revolutionary research. She believes that a protein harvested from the brain of a mako shark can help reactivate dormant brain cells in humans, thereby providing a cure for Alzheimer’s.

All she needs to do to get hold of enough of this protein is genetically engineer the sharks to make their brains bigger. In turn, this makes the sharks more intelligent and much deadlier, but hey, that’s an acceptable trade-off, right?

Naturally, this ends in disaster, and McCallister’s entire facility is overrun by super-intelligent, murderous sharks. It’s not a great day at the office for her, and Burrows plays her mounting terror and guilt as if a bad day at work were the sum total of the stakes involved. She looks glassy-eyed and bored for most of the film, and utterly fails to convince as a scientist who has any idea what she’s talking about. The performance is so low-key, in fact, that she makes her wooden co-star Thomas Jane look positively bursting with charisma.

Here’s the thing, though: might Burrows’ semi-lobotomised take on the character actually have been perfect for the film? Every audience member who watches the movie thinks, “What kind of idiot thought making the sharks bigger and more dangerous was a good idea?!” Then Burrows appears, and it all makes perfect sense: this kind of idiot. Someone who fails to see the gravity of the situation until she’s stripped down to her underwear, trying to lure a shark toward her so that she can electrocute it to death. Ah, the ’90s.

Mark Wahlberg – Staff Sergeant Sean Dignam (The Departed, 2006)

Mark Wahlberg was nominated for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ at the Oscars for his foul-mouthed performance as Staff Sergeant Sean Dignam, the most Bostonian cop who ever Bostoned, in The Departed.

Nowadays, it seems improbable that this happened, but this was the year Hollywood finally decided to give Martin Scorsese his due, so perhaps Wahlberg was a beneficiary of all the Marty love floating around.

Now, was Wahlberg’s performance worthy of an Oscar nomination? I’d argue no. In fact, in some ways, it’s a pretty bad performance, and Dignam never once comes across like a real person. Instead, he seems like a walking ball of testosterone whose vocabulary consists primarily of the C-word, and whose only setting is “simmering rage”, even when sitting in an office beside his beloved boss, Martin Sheen’s Captain Queenan. Sure, there are bound to be a lot of rage monster cops out there, but Wahlberg’s anger veers too often into unintentional comedy to be taken remotely seriously.

Having said all that, though, it begs a question: is ‘comedy rage monster’ exactly what the doctor ordered for a character like Dignam? Everybody else in the movie is so busy with their nefarious plans and double crosses that someone like Dignam comes across refreshingly straightforward. Wahlberg could have played Dignam more like an actual human being, but would that have been anywhere near as entertaining or fun? Nope. So, in that regard, is this bad performance actually a work of genius? Maybe. But it still shouldn’t have got him a nomination.

Tommy Lee Jones – Harvey Dent/Two-Face (Batman Forever, 1995)

It’s well known that Tommy Lee Jones hated Jim Carrey’s guts on the set of Batman Forever. Most people have always assumed that Hollywood’s favourite craggy, stone-faced Texan despised the rubber-faced comedy star because he couldn’t stand his cartoon-like energy. He is, after all, far too serious a thespian to ever sanction such buffoonery.

Amusingly, though, if you read interviews conducted around the time with Jones and people in his orbit, it’s entirely possible he hated Carrey for another reason: he wanted to be the funny guy.

Yes, that’s right. I contend that Tommy Lee Jones, a man whose grim visage could turn most people to stone, signed up for Batman Forever because he envisioned himself as a new comedy superstar. This is why his performance as Two-Face, a tragic and frightening character in the Batman comics, is so wildly flamboyant and over-the-top. Jones wanted to out-Carrey Carrey, and likely looked at Jack Nicholson’s scenery-chewing turn as the Joker six years earlier, and thought, “Hold my beer.”

Thankfully, two years later, Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld convinced Jones that he could still be funny, but it would work better if he were the straight man to Will Smith’s more exuberant character. This left Two-Face as the sole cackling, maniacal, cartoonish character in Jones’ sombre career, and it’s an undeniably terrible performance. But, then again, it’s also extremely fun to watch if you’re in the right mood, and will always have some merit as an outlier in his oeuvre. So, was it bad? Yes. But I also kind of like it a lot.

Dakota Johnson – Cassandra Webb (Madame Web, 2024)

Madame Web is a dreadful film. At this point, that goes without saying. Hell, even its star, Dakota Johnson, had no problem telling the world’s media that the movie was bad, she was miscast in it, and she’d never do anything like it again. As far as these things go, that was arguably the most dramatic way any actor has consciously uncoupled from superhero movies, and in double quick time, too.

In truth, it’s not hard to see why Johnson wanted to cut all ties with the film as soon as she could. There are precisely zero good performances in the film, not even from hot young talents like Sydney Sweeney and Isabela Merced, Severance’s Adam Scott, or the usually brilliant Tahar Rahim. In fact, Rahim’s villain, Ezekiel, is one of the worst villains in superhero movie history, and the overdubbing used on many of his lines is embarrassing for everyone involved.

However, while there aren’t any objectively good performances in the movie, I’d argue that Johnson’s turn falls into the highly subjective “so bad, it’s good” territory. Sure, she looks confused and semi-zonked out on medication the whole time. Sure, she often has the urgency of someone running slightly late for a dentist’s appointment. Still, there are a few scenes where her performance is genuinely funny, such as one moment in which she tries to stick to a wall like Spider-Man, but just slowly slides down to the ground, with a deadpan look on her face. I, for one, choose to believe this scene was meant to be funny. I have to believe that.

Jack Palance – Yves Perret (Tango & Cash, 1989)

The fact that Jack Palance played a villain named ‘Yves Perret’ in Tango & Cash is almost worth the price of admission alone. However, hilariously ill-fitting character name aside, Palance’s performance in Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell’s explosive buddy cop action movie is the absolute height of ’80s excess, in all its dubious glory. This is the kind of performance that is an enormous amount of fun to watch, even if you’re watching it in slack-jawed disbelief at the insanity unfolding on-screen.

In Tango & Cash, a movie that, admittedly, bears no resemblance to reality in any way, shape, or form, Perret plays a crime boss who conducts business from a neon-lit ’80s bad guy lair. He sits in front of a bank of televisions that take up an entire wall, has a rat maze built into his bar, and a hall of mirrors in an adjoining room. Hey, if you’re making millions in ill-gotten gains, what are you going to spend your money on?

In case it isn’t obvious, Palance’s performance in Tango & Cash is preposterous even for an era that delivered plenty of preposterous action movies. However, the City Slickers star dialling it up to 11 somehow feels fitting for a film that exists in a world in which Stallone and Russell’s hero cops are so famous that their wrongful arrest for murder – a scheme concocted by Perret, obviously – makes the front page of the newspaper. All in all, I couldn’t, in good conscience, say Palance’s performance is good acting, but man, oh man, it’s a blast.