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The Biggest Disappointments of the ’00s

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Let’s be careful to define our terms here. “Disappointments” aren’t the same thing as “all-time worsts.” We’re not saying any of these were as bad as, say, Battlefield Earth or The Hottie and the Nottie or Carrot Top’s facelift. The difference is that somebody, somewhere, in reaction to the reputation of the people involved or the hype that had been generated around them, got his hopes up in anticipation that these might be pretty good. Which makes it all so much more poignant.

chris-rock1. CHRIS ROCK’S MOVIE CAREER: By the end of the ’90s, Chris Rock’s HBO stand-up specials and his talk show and his book had made him the most plausible candidate ever to fill Richard Pryor’s shoes. He’s still a triumphant comedian. But when he tried to add “movie star” to his resume, he choked, repeatedly, and badly. In movies as different as Nurse Betty and the remake of The Longest Yard, this fearless performer seemed hobbled by self-consciousness, as if he wasn’t sure whether to try to act or just be himself. And while it’s understandable that a young novice might feel awkward when he’s suddenly called upon to hold his own against Morgan Freeman, it’s another thing when he’s failing to supplant your memory of the actor who played the bugler on F Troop.

vin-diesel2. VIN DIESEL: Between the start of 2000 and mid-2001, Diesel starred in Pitch Black and The Fast and the Furious and also accepted a smaller role in the contemporary drama Boiler Room, because, he said, he wanted to make sure people understood that he wasn’t just an action stud but also a serious actor. (How’s that working out for you?) He also walked away from the first sequel to The Fast and the Furious because he felt that he had to choose between it and the other potentially long-running franchises tied to his name — the Pitch Black-derived “Riddick” series, which hit a wall with its second, pricey installment, and XXX, which yielded a Diesel-free sequel starring Ice Cube. This year, Diesel returned to star in the fourth The Fast and the Furious film and is threatening to revive the XXX series with his pet director, Rob Cohen. This is some sad-ass trapped-in-a-revolving-door shit.

dane-cook3. DANE COOK: At his mid-decade peak, Cook inspired a lot of cultural observers and trendspotters to explain that the lesson of his career was that if you’re inoffensively bland, dependably edgeless, unoriginal, and unfunny —  and you sweat your ass off doing enough enough self-promotion online — you can be the most popular stand-up comic in America. A subsequent recount revealed that the most popular stand-up comic in America is Jeff Dunham, who offers everything to his audiences that Cook does, with the added attraction of racist puppets.

2004_alexander_0044. COLIN FARRELL: In the past decade, was there anybody, with the possible exception of Sarah Palin, who was catapulted from total obscurity onto the covers of more magazines and who did less to back it up? Sold to the public as a combination of the young De Niro, the younger Brando, and an Irish Pepe le Pew, he found his niche as a target for Academy Award show bloggers armed with STD jokes. In fairness, he managed to be likable and funny on those occasions — Intermission, In Bruges, even parts of Daredevil — when he got to play a clumsy dope who was light years away from being as tough, capable, or exciting as he imagined himself to be. But does anybody reallly think he was acting?

wes-bentley5. WES BENTLEY: After Bentley played the bug-eyed neighbor kid in American Beauty, his co-star Kevin Spacey (who himself would spend the next ten years serving as the best argument since F. Murray Abraham that the Best Actor Oscar is cursed) opined that, for his breakout performance, Wes would receive the “you-get-to-work-forever” prize. What Spacey didn’t have the heart to tell his young friend was that the work might involve wearing a paper hat and asking people if they want cheese on those burgers.

kimbo-slice6. KIMBO SLICE: Like Vin Diesel, he has the name and physical appearance of a comic-book character from the files of Jack Kirby, which is always a great way to get the attention of the eleven-year-old boy who dwells in all of us. Unlike Vin Diesel, he didn’t enter a profession where the writers and directors can ensure that you win your fights.


vanwilder37. NATIONAL LAMPOON, INC.: Once upon a long time ago, the National Lampoon was a magazine. Its greatest days were over by the mid-1970s, and it hasn’t put out a new issue since the late ’90s, but it was so great a satirical magazine that comedy geeks and other pop-culture addicts still talk about it in awed tones. In 2002, bad people relaunched the name, scotch-taping it to titty comedies, pay-per-view strip-poker matches, and other frat-rat fare. Now people who worked on the real Lampoon when that was something to be proud of have been reduced to scrubbing it from their resumes, lest prospective employers think they had something to do with National Lampoon’s Dorm Daze or The Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell.

_keith-olbermann8. KEITH OLBERMANN: In 1998, Olbermann became a hero when he abandoned the first cable-news show he’d gotten to anchor rather than offer the all-Monica Lewinsky-all-the-time coverage his MSNBC masters expected of him. When he returned to the network in 2003 with Countdown, he was still smart, funny, irreverent —  even sexy, in a kind of uber-nerd way — a refreshing corrective to a media landscape full of pompous asses auditioning for the role of the next White House press spokesman. But as the conventional wisdom shifted more and more in his direction, Olbermann’s smugness ate his better instincts alive, and by the start of last year’s presidential election, he was as hard to take as any of the right-wing buffoons he’d skewered over and over again. Watching him now, as he indulges in tired feuds and in-jokes and special-comments his way to Broadcast Hell, is like watching a drunk yell at his imaginary friends, thinking he’s playing Ed Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck.

survivor9. REALITY TV ALL-STAR SHOWS: Watching the all-star editions of Survivor and The Amazing Race, seeing beloved fan favorites like Rupert Boneham or Kevin and Drew hobble about trying to make lightning strike twice, is a sobering lesson in the strange chemistry of this strange form of entertainment: people distinguish themselves in it when they’re part of just the right collection of fellow exhibitionists at just the right place and time in their lives. Unless they’re Boston Rob, who’ll be the only person still here to keep the cockroaches company after a nuclear holocaust.

james-frey10. JAMES FREY: Frey rebounded from a lifetime of apparently well-deserved failure when, with a little guidance from his editor and some promotional help from his new friend Oprah Winfrey, he helped invent the template for the terrible novel marketed as a memoir, a literary subgenre which has since become a growth industry. Nothing disappointing in that — anyone who tried to read Frey’s work (or his “me-heap-tough-writing-man” interviews) could only savor his public humiliation. But then, having disgraced himself, he came back and had another hit. In this, too, he was a trendsetter.

DISHONORABLE MENTIONS: Hayden Christensen; BBC America; compassionate conservatism; the Stooges’ The Weirdness; Mark Prior; David Lynch’s discovery of shooting on digital video; That’s My Bush!; All Star Batman and Robin; the ownership society; Carnivale; everything the Blair Witch guys have done since The Blair Witch Project; Jennifer Lopez (not that we ever expected the world from her, but we swear that as recently as ten years ago, we could at least remember what she was supposed to be famous for); John from Cincinnati; Pets.com; Too Human; Zwan; Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow; Pajamas Media; Brittany Murphy; Judith Miller, First Amendment martyr; 90210; mumblecore; Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay; Cameron Crowe; Kate Hudson (casting her as the dream-girl character in Almost Famous, Crowe reportedly promised he wouldn’t make her look ridiculous; turned out she didn’t need anybody’s help with that); The Cold Six Thousand; Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia; Sega Dreamcast; Stephon Marbury; The Wackness; Charles Frazier; Eminem’s The Relapse; Superman Returns; JCVD; 50 Cent; Ryan Leaf (hey, somebody hired him after 2000, so somebody must have still had hopes for him); the Whitest Kids U Know; and the episode of Law & Order where Chevy Chase played Mel Gibson.

Check back tomorrow for the biggest PLEASANT SURPRISES of 2000-2009!

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