“The lowest of the low”: the movie Jack Black called his “career nadir”
It’s easy to assume that an actor would call the objectively worst movie of their entire career the nadir, but Jack Black has starred in several films that are significantly worse than the one he bestowed with any performer’s most unwanted distinction.
In fact, it’s nowhere near the bottom of his filmic barrel, which maybe says more about him than the picture itself. Is it worse than Barry Levinson’s risible Envy? Absolutely not. Does it sink lower than Eli Roth’s wretched Borderlands? No chance. Is it superior to Harold Ramis’ interminable Year One? Easily.
That’s without even mentioning Saving Silverman, which Roger Ebert hated with an intense and burning passion, Gulliver’s Travels, which co-star Emily Blunt has openly lamented several times over since it was released, the cinematic lump of coal in the stocking that was the Farrelly brothers’ Dear Santa, or A Minecraft Movie, the sort of blockbuster that keeps Martin Scorsese awake at night.
It would be a lie to suggest that Black’s back catalogue is nothing but an assemblage of turds, because he’s done great work in great movies, like School of Rock, Bernie, and High Fidelity. Shallow Hal isn’t the offender in question, either, even though it’s the one that he’ll always regret making the most.
Instead, a quaint comedy with a star-studded cast that revolves around bird-watching took the top spot. In David Frankel’s The Big Year, Black shares an ensemble with Steve Martin, Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston, Rosamund Pike, Dianne Wiest, John Cleese, and more, with the story following three men in the grips of various crises who decide to enter an ornithological contest to count as many birds as possible.
It sounds awfully twee, which might be why audiences had precisely zero interest in seeing it on the big screen. The Big Year crashed, burned, and exploded into a thousand shards of nothingness at the box office, where it only earned a little over $7 million against a production budget north of $40 million.
It’s not a good film by any means, but even though he’s been in plenty worse, Black couldn’t see past it when Exclaim wanted to know about the lowest point in his professional life. “God, there’s been a few lately,” he pondered. “What’s the lowest of the low? I guess my nadir was probably that bird-watching movie.”
“I know it was good, but, career-wise, when no one goes to see a movie that you’re in with Steve Martin and Owen Wilson, that’s when you’ve got to feel bad,” he explained. In theory, the director of The Devil Wears Prada gathering together an esteemed array of comedians, character actors, assorted legends, and the odd icon should have been a recipe for success, but in practice, nobody gave a shit about The Big Year.
Black most likely views it as his nadir because he had high hopes that it would turn out as the sum of the parts mentioned above, only for audiences to give it the complete cold shoulder and render it irrelevant and obsolete from almost the second it hit the big screen.
