When Judi Dench met Vin Diesel: The great actors slumming it in terrible films
Why did two-time Oscar winner and eternal critics’ darling Cate Blanchett, who must have a lot of good scripts hitting the doormat, decide to star in Borderlands, a universally derided video-game adaptation about space outlaws?
She has, in fact, put this curious decision down to “Covid madness” in 2020, when she was cast. In an interview with Empire magazine, Blanchett explained, “I was spending a lot of time in the garden, using the chainsaw a little too freely. My husband said, ‘This film could save your life.’”
To practice, she got herself a PS5 and started playing the games, then got mired in a frazzling mess of a production needing multiple reshoots. This was all for a film which opened poorly, in line with industry expectations, then fell off abysmally in week two, qualifying it as a megabomb.
Even lowest-common-denominator multiplex fare that makes money, in the opinion of Brian Cox, can be damaging to the culture, leaving cinema “in a bad way”, and diluting the careers of his acting colleagues.
Cox speaks from an enlightened position: he took a role in one of Marvel’s best films, X2 (2003), and then got out – which is more than can be said for Anthony Hopkins, who appears in all four Thor movies and implies he’s somewhat wasted in them. “They put me in armour,” he told the New Yorker, “they shoved a beard on me. Sit on the throne, shout a bit. If you’re sitting in front of a green screen, it’s pointless acting it.”
There’s a level of slumming it that almost all film actors must tolerate once in a while, even if it’s just to placate their management and stay visible. If they sink a little too far, it gets noticed. Perhaps not if they do it constantly. You might ask why Ben Kingsley is absent from the roster below, and the reason is only this: which film would you choose? Thunderbirds? Bloodrayne? Parting Shots? The Love Guru? A Sound of Thunder? Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time? Dragonheart 3: The Sorcerer’s Curse? Sir Ben could have a whole list unto himself. Some of the more exceptional cases of abandoning quality control, though, are as follows.
10. Anthony Hopkins in Bad Company (2002)
Devotees of Hopkins had many years to wait before his stage training and meticulous intensity on screen led to that glorious career boost when he won his first Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs. But it was another whole decade before he got to deliver the immortal line “Get in the car, bitch!” to Chris Rock – while playing a CIA agent named Gaylord Oakes.
This honour was given to Hopkins by Jerry Bruckheimer and Joel Schumacher, when they decided to cast him opposite Rock in this utterly meh odd-couple action comedy. The script could hardly have had less reputable origins: it was originally devised as a sequel to the Martin Lawrence vehicle Blue Streak (1999). Hopkins soon admitted he had absolutely no idea why he agreed to do it. Such qualms, admittedly, didn’t stop him going on to make such tripe as The Rite (2011), Red 2 (2013), Solace (2015) and a particularly dire pairing with frequent slummer Al Pacino in Misconduct (2016). Thank heavens Hopkins is a legend, regardless of consistency.
9. Nicolas Cage in The Wicker Man (2006)
“Not the bees! Not the bees!”. Of all the many meme-able moments in Cage’s career, this one has somehow stuck hardest. Cage has landed on a rich seam lately, but this was a shocking instalment in his wobbly National Treasure/Ghost Rider era of needing better management – and don’t get us started on stuff like Next (2007) and Trespass (2011).
Neil LaBute’s hysterically misguided remake is still the nadir, not least for transforming the pagan worshipful into an insane matriarchal cult, and giving Cage little option but to run around punching them. Cage caged, screaming and gurgling while bees are poured into his helmet – it’s perhaps the only moment of much-quoted Cagery that’s ever been iconic in a bad way. Plus, Ellen Burstyn is getting off lightly here, for playing the island’s queen bee “Sister Summerisle” in floaty white caftans and inexplicable William Wallace face paint.
8. Beyoncé Knowles in Obsessed (2009)
Beyoncé’s acting career had cruised fine through the likes of Dreamgirls (2006) and Cadillac Records (2008) before hitting a needlessly low-class wall here. It amounts to a remake of Fatal Attraction, only with the focus switched around so that the wife, as played by Bey, is a more active responder. She becomes jealous of the office temp (Ali Larter) after her husband (Idris Elba) is just a fraction too friendly. To be fair, Larter’s character is trying it on with every tool at her disposal: lip-biting under the mistletoe, a trench coat over nothing but lingerie, you name it.
Hell hath no fury like Beyoncé scorned, but she was not coaxed into excelling, and the film’s soap-level melodrama was well beneath everyone not playing the bunny boiler. Once Larter has snuck upstairs to luxuriate in the couple’s bed, the final catfight is a full swerve into Nineties psychothriller tat, with Beyoncé’s high heeled boots getting a bizarre proportion of the close-ups.
7. Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr Moreau (1996)
The making of this film was a fiasco for the ages, with Val Kilmer swapping roles before behaving impossibly, other actors (Bruce Willis, Rob Morrow) walking off, and the original director, Richard Stanley, being sacked on the third day of shooting, only to return on set disguised as a mutant dog – to spy on what his replacement, John Frankenheimer, was up to.
Through it all, Marlon Brando stayed put, generally in his air-conditioned trailer, while everyone else sweltered in the tropical heat of North Queensland. He insisted on applying his own white face paint and providing accessories – overbite dentures, rubber gloves filled with baby powder – to contribute to Dr Moreau’s doolally appearance. Also, he made firm friends with the 71cm tall Dominican actor Nelson de la Rosa, which explains why Dr Moreau’s Mini-Me, Majai, accompanies him every step of the way. The general feeling of the inmates taking over the asylum, with Brando in charge, makes it an off-the-wall experience.
6. Pete Postlethwaite in ?on Flux (2005)
To have been a fly on the wall at the wardrobe fitting here would have been something. When Postlethwaite signed on for a supporting role in this 2005 sci-fi flop – a distinctively bizarre, sadly botched attempt to establish the action-heroine credentials of Charlize Theron – he must have known he’d be playing Keeper, a guardian of humanity’s DNA archive who is 400 years old and change.
What he didn’t, perhaps, realise is that he’d be inserted feet first into something resembling a ribbed, beige lampshade, rendered bald, and made to look overall like a giant circumcised penis. Costume designer Beatrix Aruna Pasztor (Good Will Hunting, Basic Instinct 2) really did a number on the actor here, and it’s hard for Postlethwaite’s natural authority to overcome the insult, even when he has crucial elements of the plot to explain. Theron looks profoundly baffled when they first meet, as well she might.
5. Jon Voight in Anaconda (1997)
It’s hard to decide what counts as a more fearsome menace in Anaconda – the 25-foot-long title character, with all the dodgy CG assistance 1997 could provide, or Jon Voight’s acting as a Paraguayan snake hunter called Paul Serone. Our heroine, Jennifer Lopez, gets it from both ends: when she’s not scurrying from one creature’s slimy embrace, she’s having to endure the equally grotesque leering of the latter.
The sound department even linked these two threats, hilariously, by putting a predatory snake noise over the infamous moment when Voight is sizing J.Lo up. By the end, though, Serone is well overdue a taste of his own medicine. The anaconda wraps itself around him and eats him whole, occasioning a highly undignified “gullet-cam” shot of it swallowing him headfirst. The Trump-boosting Voight of today now blames “Marxist brainwashing” for the feminist, leftist post-Vietnam drama Coming Home (1978) that snagged him an Oscar. But he has yet to explain Anaconda.
4. Judi Dench in The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)
In the winter of 2002-3, Judi Dench was in a David Hare play opposite Maggie Smith at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, when she received a bouquet of flowers from an unexpected fan: Vin Diesel. “They couldn’t fit up the stairs to my dressing room,” she recalled. “Then he asked if I would be in his film. And of course I said yes. Why ever not?”.
Imagine Maggie Smith’s envy. The film was not a sequel to The Fast and the Furious (2001) or xXx (2002) but to Pitch Black (2000), the sci-fi B-movie Diesel had made just before his career took off. In this costly, misfiring expansion of the franchise, Dench would play a character called Aereon, some kind of wafting Air Elemental who’s being kept prisoner: overtones of The Tempest, one of few Shakespeare plays with which Dench is not strictly associated.
Her incongruity is striking (“There are very few of us who have met a Necromonger and lived to speak of it”), and her pairing with Diesel must be one of cinema’s least predictable. He was chivalrous in reportedly trying to get Dench a $7m salary for the role – even if it seems immensely unlikely this materialised.
3. Michael Caine in Jaws: The Revenge (1987)
“I have never seen it”, Caine famously confessed of the fourth and worst Jaws film, in which he opted to star as a charter plane pilot called Hoagie Newcombe, who half-heartedly romances the widowed Lorraine Gary character, then tries not to get eaten. “By all accounts it is terrible,” he went on. (It is terrible.) “However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.”
It remains unclear whether Caine has ever bothered to sit through his icky dalliance with Sean Young in Blue Ice (1992), villainous face-offs with Steven Seagal in the eco-turkey On Deadly Ground (1994), or run-ins with killer bees in The Swarm (1978). He’s 91 by now, and has earned a few stinkers. I think we’ll leave it at that.
2. Jeremy Irons in Dungeons & Dragons (2000)
A generation before 2023’s quite spirited Honour Among Thieves, gamers had to make do with this by a way of a big-screen D&D transfer – a fantastically wretched romp co-starring the likes of Thora Birch, Marlon Wayans, Richard O’Brien and Tom Baker (as “Havarth the Elf”). Given the general state of the sets, costumes and effects, it would be hard to believe this cost $45m even now, let alone at the turn of the millennium.
Irons, of course, plays an evil mage called Profion. Snarling, smirking and maniacally laughing almost whatever he has to say, he has never indulged himself with a more “unrestrained” (read: deranged) performance. If you came out of your trailer and realised the only way forward was ham, calculated the bodyweight of ham you might carve from a whole passel of pigs, found the thespian equivalent of that, and then doubled down on it for good measure, you might come close to the insanity of Jeremy Irons in Dungeons & Dragons. It has to be seen to be believed.
1. Joan Crawford in Trog (1970)
Here we have it: Joan Crawford in her last ever role, and the one which really nudged her over the line to retirement. Joan flinging lizards out of a bucket at her new pet, a troglodyte dragged out of his cave and brought to her lab for observation. Joan beaming with something like maternal love for this humanoid, teaching him to play, concerned when he escapes, scolding naughty Trog when he kidnaps a little girl.
Joan supplying her own wardrobe of pastelly pantsuits, and also wearing rather more make-up than seems appropriate for a busy anthropologist. Joan looking, in the end, teary and done with it, after Trog is unconvincingly impaled on a stalagmite. Joan sadly walking away.
The film might not have got made if she hadn’t signed on, but Freddie Francis, the experienced cinematographer/director with reams of horror expertise, found it the worst job of his life. He wished he hadn’t put Crawford through it, either. Warner Bros should probably have shown mercy, maybe by pretending the negs got ruined during processing. It certainly didn’t make them any money. But it’s part of the Crawford lore now, and a cult classic in its pitiful way.
