TOM HANKS
I know, I know...this list is called “Stars We Hate,” and it’s hard to work up any real vitriol against Mr. Hanks: after all, he seems like a peach of a guy, he’s turned into a pretty good producer and he established an eternal place for himself in the cinematic canon as the voice of Woody in Toy Story 1 & 2. But let me ask you something: do you consider Tim “Buzz Lightyear” Allen a truly iconic movie star? The Cary Grant of his generation? No? Why not? Like Hanks, Allen also rose to fame as a likeable lug in a dumb sitcom, then made the leap to movies with a series of mostly terrible high concept comedies, give or take one undeniable classic apiece (Galaxy Quest for Allen, Big or Splash for Hanks, depending who you ask). And, like Hanks, you totally wouldn’t believe Allen as a dangerous tough guy mobster in Road To Perdition...although, wait, actually, I take that back: considering Tim Allen was busted with a pound of cocaine back in 1978, ratted out 21 drug dealers to avoid a life sentence and spent more than two years in prison, I’m guessing he’s got more than a little bit of a dark side, which makes him an interesting performer even though, for some reason, he’s mostly chosen to squander his talent on crap over the years. Hanks, on the other hand, is more ambitious and, in the “serious” half of his career, has generally chosen better material (three movies with Meg Ryan notwithstanding)...but the problem is there’s no there there: he’s just not that great an actor, no matter how many Best Actor awards he wins. Sure, he pulled the “lose a lot of weight” gimmick for Castaway, which puts him on par (at best) with Ethan Hawke and Christian Bale, who pulled the same trick for Alive and The Machinist, respectively (though neither of them won an Oscar for their efforts). Playing gay was just another award-winning acting gimmick for Hanks in Philadelphia: I never believed his performance for a second, just as I failed to believe his grizzled tough guy act in Perdition or Saving Private Ryan. At his best, in light comedy or light drama like Apollo 13, Hanks is akin to the guy who got all the starring roles in your high school drama club...appealingly bland in productions the audience is predisposed to like. But a modern-day Jimmy Stewart (as people who should know better insist on calling him)? Hardly. For one thing, Jimmy Stewart would never have subjected us to Bachelor Party or Forrest Gump.
DIANE KEATON
In certain quarters here at Hooksexup’s opulent Screengrab HQ, Diane Keaton is held not only to be not a bad actress, but in fact a rather good one. You will recall, because I know you read everything we post here every day, that she even appeared in the Honorable Mention section of our list of the Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time. A gentlemanly raising prevents me from mentioning the name of the Screengrab contributor who placed Ms. Keaton into nomination; but I beg of you -- since I assume you all agree with me that Diane Keaton could not act her way out of a paper bag, or act her way into a paper bag, or even act in the general vicinity of a paper bag -- do not e-mail jibes and rotten fruit at this individual. He is a fine man, an insightful film writer, and an intelligent human being, but once, when we were shooting the back nine at Burning Tree, he caught a stray Ben Hogan right in the temple, and ever since then, he has been unable to recognize Diane Keaton’s fretfully obvious limitations as an actress. Starting out strong by playing Woody Allen’s most appealing muse in Annie Hall, she soon discovered that a career as a professional actress would require her to display emotions other than whimsy and peevishness, a task to which she was sadly unequal. Witness, for example, her performance in The Little Drummer Boy, a woefully overrated film in which she proves that as an actress, she is unable to convincingly portray an actress. Even in her biggest break, playing the insufferably Kay in the first two Godfather movies, her greatest accomplishment is to leave you feeling baffled as to what Michael Corleone – or, for that matter, Francis Ford Coppola – ever saw in her to begin with. Happily, since she has descended into middle age, she has been relegated to the kind of roles Hollywood tends to offer middle-aged women, which greatly reduces the odds that I will ever have to see her in anything ever again.
ANDIE MACDOWELL
Joe Queenan, one of film criticism’s greatest haters, once said of the enervating Penelope Ann Miller that “if she is still alive, Penelope Ann Miller is the worst actress alive. And if she is dead, good.” While I can’t say that I actively wish for Andie MacDowell’s death, I will say that if she were suddenly stricken with some horrible disease that prevented her from ever appearing in front of a camera again, I would send a hundred dollars to any charity vowing to prevent the disease from being cured. While I certainly can’t argue that Penelope Ann Miller is a horrendously bad actress, I will say that, unlike Andie MacDowell, she did not seem to have a knack for convincing talented directors to put her in good movies. While MacDowell's career started out poorly – in her debut role in Greystoke, she was out-acted by both a chimpanzee and Christopher Lambert, and she went on to be only the third most annoying thing about St. Elmo’s Fire – she somehow got herself cast as the lead in the otherwise excellent sex, lies and videotape, where she first showed her ability to flounder around helplessly while being outacted by every sentient creature in the vicinity. She went on to appear in Groundhog Day, where she was unable to convince me that Bill Murray would bother crossing the street for her, let alone turning back time. But her crowning crappiness was in Robert Altman’s wonderful Short Cuts, a movie whose greatness is evident in the fact that it survived being completely ground to a halt by her reading of a line -- in what was meant to be the movie’s most intensely emotional scene -- with all the passion of a piece of cardboard. I haven’t seen her in anything since she conned Wim Wenders into putting her in The End of Violence, but IMDB tells me that she’s spent the last 12 years making movies, just as if she weren’t the very worst actress in the world.
ROBERT REDFORD
If you look at some of Redford's early supporting performances in movies such as Inside Daisy Clover and The Chase, or even his earlier guest shots on such TV shows as The Twilight Zone and Route 66, you see a self-aware guy with a sly wit and the ability to sketch out a character in a few quick strokes. What happened? He turned into a politician, focusing public attention on his support for good causes ranging from the environment to independent filmmaking and taking longer and longer breaks from the screen. It's good to have interests, but the thing is, the breaks from the screen eventually seemed to be continuing even when he was on screen. From the moment that he (belatedly) became a big star on the back of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Redford's acting became more and more minimalistic, until you began to suspect that he put out so little for fear of expressing something that might alienate or cool off a single member of his target demographic. At the same time, what looked like simple vanity was eating into and damaging his movies in big ways (such as his inability to connect with Mia Farrow in The Great Gatsby) and small (such as his refusal to allow his character to receive a jailhouse haircut when he's undercover in a barbaric Southern prison in Brubaker.) Redford made his name at the moment when Hollywood was suddenly deluged with new "ethnic" stars such as Pacino, De Niro, and Dustin Hoffman, as well as stars who fell far outside the pretty-boy category, such as Gene Hackman, and for decades Redford got first pick of the glamorous, man of few words golden boy romantic lead roles in old-fashioned films such as Out of Africa and the benighted Havana because he was thought to be the closest thing left to a star in that mold. Which is fine, but it's surprising that so smart a guy would have wanted those roles, especially given that he didn't devote much time to doing anything else. (Maybe all that shampoo ate into his brain.) Whether as an actor (The Last Castle, Up Close and Personal, Spy Game), a director (The Legend of Bagger Vance), or both (The Horse Whisperer, Lions for Lambs), his films of the last several years couldn't be more beside the point. He faces the end of his career in the very odd position of being a hero to young independent filmmakers at the film festival his Sundance Institute sponsors rather than for any movies he's actually worked on.
BRAD PITT
Pitt became America's sweetheart through his role as the one night stand of Geena Davis' dreams in Thelma and Louise, but the thing about one night stands is you're never supposed to have to see them again. It didn't take too many leading roles to reveal that Pitt couldn't act a lick, but it was easy to sympathize with all the people who didn't mind so long as they got to rest their eyes on him for a couple of hours. However, two factors made Pitt's superstardom more grating than the success of most fabulously good-looking untalented people: first, a lot of people, some of them movie critics, liked looking at him so much that they actually started talking as if he were in fact one hell of an actor, and not just a skillful master of his craft, but rather some kind of high-flying hip icon, earning him the respect of people who wouldn't cross the street to piss on, say, Keanu Reeves; and, second, for a while he seemed to think that he had something to prove, so after being content to flash his teeth and his six-pack in Thelma and Louise, A River Runs Through It, and Legends of the Fall, he actually started taking on challenging roles in creatively ambitious projects, and in the course of time showed that he had it in him to be a real menace. To see Pitt trying to break new acting ground in 12 Monkeys, Se7en and Interview with the Vampire (where he mostly succeeded in making his co-star, Tom Cruise, look better than he ever had before, albeit by comparison) is to experience the same kind of flush of emotions one might feel watching a drunken monkey juggle plastic explosives. When he has no idea what to do, as in most of Vampire, he pouts as if the director just hit him with a yardstick and bruised his winkie. When, God help us, he's fully confident and going for broke, as in 12 Monkeys, his uncontrolled spasm of a performance makes you fear for his co-workers. During the late '90s, in such films as Seven Days in Tibet and Meet Joe Black, he did seem to find his true niche, getting paid kajillions of dollars to star in unbelievably long, misconceived movies that nobody would see. And he gave what will likely stand as his best-remembered performance in Fight Club, in which he was well-cast as a violent lunatic's vainest projection of his imaginary self-image. Time, money, and acclaim seem to have mellowed him, and the on-screen company of George Clooney and Angelina Jolie has been good for him; in the Danny Ocean pictures and Mr. and Mrs. Smith, he's been content to hang around on screen like a handsome lump, allowing the filmmakers to tap into his proven box office appeal while leaving the heavy lifting to his more gifted co-stars. But on those occasions where he's attempted to re-affirm his acting stature by impersonating Achilles or Jess James -- well, he still pouts real good.
Click Here For Part One, Part Three & Part Four
Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent