Bad acting is sometimes more memorable than good acting. Everyone remembers The Room, but nobody remembers, like, Lions For Lambs. A new video from Looper collects some of Hollywood’s most legendarily terrible performances, with examples running the gamut from teen dreck (Twilight) to prestige indies (Dazed and Confused) to modern classics (Bram Stoker’s Dracula) to, well, Gigli. Admittedly, a lot of it is low-hanging fruit, but it’s never a bad time to revisit Keanu’s wet fart of a British accent.
What’s interesting, however, is how nearly every actor featured in this has atoned for their sins with either one transcendent project or a career devoted to eclipsing that which earned them such scorn. Take Kristen Stewart, who’s getting Oscar buzz for her work in Oliver Assayas’ Personal Shopper, or Keanu Reeves, who seems to have found his true calling in the John Wick series. James Franco, who is here trashed for his turn in Spider-Man, went on to deliver what might be the defining portrait of millennial excess with his portrayal of Alien in Spring Breakers. Dazed And Confused’s Wiley Wiggins even enjoyed a latter-day renaissance with his affecting turn in Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess. And Brad Pitt? Well, not all of us think his freakout at the end of Seven is that bad; honestly, it registers as the consequence of the hinges of his mind slowly popping off, but “bad” is a subjective term, after all.