Aaron Taylor-Johnson has put together some great roles – you will likely remember him as Quicksilver in the “Avengers” movies – but “Godzilla” wasn’t one of them. The movie is good, but the king of monsters didn’t get as much screen time compared to the human characters, and ATJ just couldn’t hold the movie up when the camera was on him.
He’s likable enough and didn’t do a bad job, but he’s a little too milquetoast to handle the dramatic weight of being the principal actor in a dramatic film. However, that might have been the intention in order to keep viewers clamoring for more Godzilla.
Oscar Isaac as Apocalypse in X-Men: Apocalypse
Thanks to acting as Poe Dameron in the new Star Wars and several other high-profile and well-regarded performances, Isaac's star is on the rise. Acting as the titular villain in one of the latest “X-Men” movies did nothing to further his career, however. Isaac has acted as both chilling villains and energetic good guys, but a superpowered world-ender just didn't seem to be within his range.
You might not have even known it was Isaac underneath all that makeup, which leads to another problem – Apocalypse, while powerful and important, was not the best villain. The writing was poor, something that the “X-Men” films have had to deal with for a while.
Christian Bale as Moses in Exodus: Gods and Kings
Well, blow us down. We'd entirely forgotten about this stinker. There were problems abound during the writing, filming, and production of this “Biblical” movie. One of the major ones to critics was casting predominantly white actors and actresses for a movie set in Africa – Egypt, specifically.
While Joel Edgerton at least made his character, Ramesses II, fun, Bale as a grim and gruff Moses impressed no one. You'd think the man who led the Israelites to freedom and was Yahweh's chosen arbiter on Earth for almost forty years would have a little more charisma.
Tom Cruise as Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg in Valkyrie
Nobody will ever say Tom Cruise is a bad actor, but with that many movies under his belt, there are bound to be some that could have used more thought as to the actor. One of them is “Valkyrie,” Bryan Singer's 2008 World War II thriller about a group of German nobles trying to assassinate Hitler.
Von Stauffenberg was a real person, so casting the much shorter Cruise was seen as a little bit of an insult, and there's also the fact that Cruise didn't even try to put on a German accent. Cruise is best playing a variation of himself, and this real person wasn't the right fit.
Josh Hartnett as Brian Allen in Blow Dry
“Blow Dry” is one of those movies that wouldn't have been very good no matter who was cast, but Josh Hartnett was one of the worst choices the movie made. Hartnett plays a Yorkshire barber with an accent that causes real, physical pain to everybody who speaks or has ever heard an accent from the United Kingdom.
With some combination of Yorkshire, Irish, and California beach bum, Hartnett needed way more time to get the voice right. Poor departed Alan Rickman had to play this character's father and was probably going mad trying to deal with the accent.