Keanu Reeves in ‘Dracula’

Look, we all know what a great guy Keanu Reeves is. It’s well documented. And when it comes to action movies, he knows his onions, you only have to have watched The Matrix or any of the John Wick films to see that Keanu can kick backside with the very best of them. But the flip side to Reeves is that on occasion he can come across as more wooden than a branch of Furniture Warehouse.

This was never more evident than throughout 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in which Reeves plays English solicitor Jonathan Harker who somehow ends up with the blood-sucking Count as a client, resulting in Keanu Reeves on screen opposite Gary Oldman, which in the acting stakes is a bit like throwing a newborn kitten into the lion enclosure at London Zoo. Every single scene with Reeves in it is painful, especially the ones with Winona Ryder, who pushes him all the way in the ‘why on earth didn’t they just get a British actor to play a British person’ stakes. Reeves delivers every line in the movie like a six year old reading out what they got for Christmas to their school class. Francis Ford Coppola should have known better. Horrendous stuff.

Keira Knightley in ‘Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit’

This one qualifies not because Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit is in any way a noteworthy film, but because Keira Knightley is so unconscionably dreadful in it, and so quickly that within 15 to 20 minutes of sitting down to watch it I had to turn it off and file it under ‘never watch this again’. So bad is she that she manages to actually make the rest of the cast look bad as well, which is impressive when you consider it includes the likes of Kenneth Branagh and Kevin Costner.

She plays Chris Pine’s wife, Cathy Muller, but quite what she does in the rest of the film I have no idea because I had to turn it off. What I do know is that after a promising, fairly action packed few minutes involving a helicopter crash, Knightley arrives all nose-wrinkling and teeth and an awful, occasionally disappearing American accent saying things like “I’m just a 3rd year med school grad who needs a few more credits to pass”. Woeful. 

Don Cheadle in ‘Ocean’s Eleven’

Right up there on the list of worst movie accents in history, Don Cheadle does his very best to completely destroy this otherwise stylish and passable remake of the 1960 heist caper starring Sinatra. Cheadle is cast as an English demolitions expert ‘Basher Tarr’ which basically sounds like a name an American would imagine a British person to have, and makes a big display of blowing safes up while calling people ‘Tossaahs’. He makes Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins sound like Ray Winstone in Nil By Mouth.

He is so bad, and his accent so totally unforgivable, that he manages to derail the film completely halfway through, when rather than enjoying the unfolding scheme, you are left having a lengthy discussion with whoever you’re watching it with about how on earth casting directors make these decisions and why. Cheadle actually asked for his name to be removed from the credits, which is understandable, until you hear he only did that because he wanted to be on the poster and wasn’t allowed.

Quentin Tarantino in ‘Pulp Fiction’

Alright, so technically, he did not ruin this movie, and the movie wouldn’t even exist without him. But Quentin Tarantino’s horrible, coffee-clutching cameo in Pulp Fiction, complete with eye-gougingly needless racist dialogue and lines that read straight out of a ‘my first independent movie script’ textbook, should really have been consigned to the cutting room floor.

The whole thing stinks of nobody having enough power or influence to sit the guy down and say “Look, this is a bad idea and you shouldn’t be saying the ‘N’ word, ever, and just because you’re admittedly a genius writer and director it doesn’t mean you should be on screen any longer than Hitchcock used to be”.

Sofia Coppola in ‘The Godfather Part III’

Francis Ford Coppola strikes again, this time thanks to some healthy nepotism, a refusal to accept what he and everyone else could see with their own eyes and thirdly due to making this needless movie in the first place.

By casting his daughter Sofia Coppola in the role of Mary Corleone, the director essentially took what looked like a pretty delicious movie burger, with Al Pacino as the cheese and Diane Keaton as the bun and Andy Garcia as the juicy patty, and then just squirted a load of toothpaste into it, rendering it inedible.

She delivers each line the way that a foreign student, who has zero grasp of English, might repeat a line back to a teacher along the lines of “Can. You tell me. How to get. To the train station please.” She cannot act. Everyone on that movie set must have known it. Her Dad, who made some of the finest movies in history, must have known it. She must have known it. But somehow the film got seven Oscar nominations, presumably out of sympathy for everyone that had to be involved in making it.