From @JFrankensteiner, one of the leading lights of Film Twitter, the guy who popularized “Jimmy Carter: Letterboxd President.”
This has over six million views on Twitter and more than 100,000 likes. Is it hyperbole? Is this, in fact, the worst filmography you’re liable to see in your life? As ever, I am still just one guy, and so there are limits. I’m going to give you a real answer within limits. The point of this is not to find some random character actor who had two minutes of screentime in a bunch of British quota quickies and say, “It’s him, the blighter, he has the worst filmography.” The point is to find a star, someone who most casuals will recognize, and to look at those twenty films (I’m adding a row to what the prompt gives us) and decide if that’s the worst filmography.
Take Ryan Reynolds. That this list does not include Waiting… or Van Wilder or A Million Ways to Die in the West is immaterial. That it does not include the very enjoyable Dick is also immaterial. The point’s been made in the sample size, so while this means that like, John Wayne’s pre-Stagecoach appearances aren’t going to contribute to his overall score, it also means that we’re working on a more level playing field. Everyone gets twenty movies. The presence of one really good movie makes a world of difference. We’re looking for bleak. We want to look at those twenty movies and let out an involuntary oof of secondhand shame.
If you’re thinking to yourself that this is a mean-spirited exercise, I can grant that. On the other hand, Deadpool and Wolverine is on pace to make enough money to rival the GDP of your average Pacific island nation, and Reynolds himself got paid tens of millions of dollars to act in the picture.
Why not start with Hugh Jackman? Reynolds’ costar in Deadpool and Wolverine makes for a good test case.
It’s not great, but I don’t think it’s absolutely catastrophic either. The first three movies are going to make or break your opinion of Jackman’s filmography, and I don’t think I’m high on any of them. I really like The Prestige, and on some days I think you’ll catch me calling it Christopher Nolan’s best. Logan is not any more interesting than The Wolverine, though I like to think that says good things about The Wolverine. I’m all the way out on Prisoners. This isn’t an inspiring lot, and he’s playing literally the same guy in ten of these movies, but no: this is not the worst filmography I’ve ever seen.
How about Scarlett Johansson, who almost ties Jackman’s ten Wolverines with nine Black Widows? There are certainly some stinkers here.
There are a lot of movies here that aren’t that good. There’s Jojo Rabbit, which is an ontologically evil movie. There are also a bunch of movies here that I simply don’t think are that special: Lost in Translation, Marriage Story, and my choice for most overrated movie of the 2010s, Under the Skin. But just as Jackman’s few hits buoy up his filmography, I think it’s fair to buoy up Johansson’s with stuff that I don’t much care for but which is very well-received otherwise. Just because I think something isn’t up to snuff doesn’t mean we’re looking at the all-time worst filmography. If critics want to throw themselves into a tizzy about Under the Skin, then that’s their prerogative, and I will respect the wisdom of the cognoscenti crowd. This line of reasoning is what’s going to keep Miles Teller, Mark Rylance, and Patrick Stewart from being contenders for worst filmographies. (For what it’s worth, I think the presence of Asteroid City eliminates Johansson’s from “worst filmography” contention all by itself.)
Malin Akerman raises some questions. Is she a big enough name to qualify for this kind of activity? Does she have big enough films to make her filmography seem as disastrous as Reynolds’ filmography? (Funnily enough, these are the same two questions I’d raise about Matthew Goode, one of her Watchmen costars.)
To the first question, I think Akerman, who has starred in enough big budget films that you can say, “Oh, her!” is a big enough name. To the second question…if someone is just in a bunch of forgettable indie movies and adult comedies, is that the same as being in stuff like Free Guy or Red Notice, enormous films which suck up a lot of the air? If we’re going for the worst filmography, we can start splitting hairs this way, and the spirit of this exercise is to go big, not to punish actors for never having a giant breakout. I don’t think anyone likes Friendsgiving, but it was on Netflix within three months of its release and made, per Box Office Mojo, under $150,000 at the box office. If a tree falls in a forest, and so on.
More than that, twelve of these twenty movies come from a period between 2007 and 2012, when the movies were testing how much we responded to Malin Akerman, how much we wanted to see her in leading parts. History will tell you that moviegoers between 2007 and 2012 didn’t flock to see her. What I like about using Letterboxd for this exercise is that you know that recent films are always going to rise to the top of someone’s filmography. Because of that, if you’re getting movies towards the top which aren’t that recent, you know that what you’re looking at, say, Couples Retreat, is simply more popular than the actor’s more contemporary work.
Two more instructive examples. Amanda Seyfried doesn’t have a terrific filmography.
Maybe Mean Girls doesn’t strike you as a bona fide teen movie classic. Maybe neither of the Mamma Mia movies strikes you as particularly good cinema. Perhaps you’re not hip enough to think Jennifer’s Body is a deconstructionist masterpiece. (I’m one for three here.) But First Reformed is here. That’s enough to push her above the Reynolds Line.
For this next one, you get to guess. Audience participation.
This is a filmography which looks more than a little demoralizing, although there are some high points here and there. I don’t think this is quite as bad as what Ryan Reynolds is sporting. There’s nothing quite as good as First Reformed to lift it up. But this is also not at all representative of this actor’s career. Using these movies as a basis is like looking at the career of Ken Griffey, Jr. and saying, “Oh yeah, I remember him from the White Sox!” Here are the next twenty, which do a better job of exemplifying the actor in question.
This is much more obviously Mickey Rooney, and while the rules of this competition don’t allow for us to pull from the second twenty, I think it’s good to note that the actors who cut their teeth in the classic Hollywood era are going to fit in very weirdly compared to any of the people we’ve talked about already, people whose careers have basically fit within the 21st Century.
I pulled Peter Lawford’s filmography because the last thing I saw him in, On an Island with You, was pretty bad. He illustrates kind of a sub-point to the issue we’re going to have with actors who weren’t breaking into pictures around 9/11.
If you’re like me and you don’t remember Peter Lawford in Mrs. Miniver, Sahara, or Cluny Brown, there’s nothing to feel bad about. In the early 1940s, Lawford was being cast as an extra, and so you’d need a keen eye just to see him in Sahara. This is an issue in itself. Where Rooney gets “credit,” as it were, for lending his voice to Lady and the Tramp II, back in that heavenly time when Disney sequels went straight to video, Lawford gets “credit” for being an uncredited pilot in Mrs. Miniver. If stolen valor exists for movies, that’s what we’re talking about. But Mrs. Miniver and Sahara and Cluny Brown are all fair game. They count towards the filmography. Again, this is not a competition that easily includes people who started as MGM child actors or lot fillers. Even if it were, Lawford would be okay. The Longest Day, Exodus, and Advise and Consent are all basically the same movie, but any one of those would easily be the most interesting thing Reynolds had ever been in. There’s more good filmmaking in the “Varsity Drag” sequence in Good News than Reynolds has ever been part of. It’s not Lawford who makes the “Varsity Drag” sequence a good one, but if you had your nose to the classic Hollywood grindstone, you’re going to wind up in something with a human heartbeat even if it’s just by accident.
At this point, I wanted to share some of the worst filmographies, but as I was working through my list, a pattern showed up. I was flagging the likes of James Corden, Shailene Woodley, Aubrey Plaza, Jennifer Aniston, Peter Dinklage, Zach Braff, Ashton Kutcher, and most of all, Kevin James. (Notice that some of these people have a big plus via the work they’ve done with some auteur: Shailene Woodley in Michael Mann’s Ferrari is a good example. James Corden’s work with Mike Leigh for All or Nothing doesn’t show up in his top twenty, but it still exists. Ryan Reynolds’ auteur is Shawn Levy. I’m starting to get nervous that the right answer might be Ryan Reynolds.) What these people have in common is that they made their home on television before they were big enough to do name-brand movies. It turns out that this is not that different from being Malin Akerman. Let’s look at Aubrey Plaza, whose filmography is defined by everything that sucks about Sundance culture.
Against my better judgment, I’ve even seen a fair number of these movies, and because I think it will be totally unlike Ingrid Goes West, I want to see Megalopolis whenever that comes to theaters. But it’s hard not to watch something like The Little Hours or Happiest Season or Spin Me Round without thinking about what a Sundance audience would react to, what the distributors at Sundance would make notes on. They’re soulless movies. (Ryan, no, when we need you back I will tell you, don’t just wander over here every time I say “soulless.”) If I went looking for a soul in the top twenty films of Malin Akerman, then I would come back wanting more, but I think there are signs of it here and there, visible like the striations in rock that geologists can use to age stone. Finding the human touch in Plaza’s filmography requires a jackhammer rather than a keen eye. The principle is similar between the two even if I think the results are very different: actor begins to land movie roles, actor makes indies and rom coms and other smallish stuff, actor never becomes a genuine movie star. In neither case does that person have the goods to knock our top target off his perch, even though we can’t endorse the filmography as a whole.
Now we know what we’re looking for. We want a recent performer, preferably someone who was in some big budget films, and because having too busy or varied a career diversifies the filmography too much, we want someone who hasn’t done a ton of work. Heck, if that person has been saddled with a franchise for a long time, that’s a way in. Let’s take a gander at some real contenders – an Unlucky Thirteen – to go up against our friend Ryan.
13) Josh Hutcherson
I’m not entirely immune to this one. The original Hunger Games was a competent enough blockbuster, and compared to the Harry Potter movies bookending it by years, let alone the mess of its own sequels and the Divergent franchise, it actually looks like a standout. I include Hutcherson not because this is soul-crushing by the standards of some of the filmographies to come, but because this is a sludge with many fathers. Kid movies, teen movies, post-peak Will Ferrell, somehow even more kid movies, The Kids Are All Right (do you remember how many Oscar nominations it had?). Just because The Polar Express has become a kind of holiday classic doesn’t make it a real one.
12) Chris Pratt
Don’t let the Oscarbait fool you. I understand the appeal of Zero Dark Thirty and Moneyball. In seemingly impenetrable situations, there is someone who can cut through the crap and present an elegant, winning solution. Neither movie does much to demand our seriousness. I’m letting Her and Jennifer’s Body do a fair amount of work here, because otherwise this is a hellscape. Six MCU movies and a holiday special, ranging from passable to terrible. Three Jurassic World movies, almost uniformly execrable. Onward, one of the very worst movies Pixar has ever made. It’s been a long time since Everwood, and Pratt has never really discovered a note to play beyond boyishness. Perhaps this is why he’s in all these movies where the key audience is preteens.
11) Felicity Jones
Your eye floaters, those little strands that look like chains of cells and which show up in your vision when it’s bright out: their proper name for your floaters is “myodesopsias.” So too are the films of Felicity Jones.
10) Shailene Woodley
Woodley is trying. You can tell that she’s trying not to be the person who starred in the three Divergent movies. I don’t know if Woodley is going to be able to successfully escape from those films and from the other teen roles which define her career, but she did successfully escape from a relationship with Aaron Rodgers, so there’s some hopeful precedent. More than any other person I’m listing here, Woodley has the best chance to disappear from this list if I were to give it another go in five years. Maybe she’ll never play a part more famous than Hazel Grace, but there’s clearly a will here to make movies which stand in opposition to the earlier part of her career. Snowden and The Mauritanian are of a piece, down to the piece that neither one of those is that good. If she makes two more movies as good as Ferrari, she’ll be out of contention for good.
9) Seann William Scott
Amidst the detritus of endless American Pie sequels and Ice Age sequels, a real shot-chaser for the lye and tonic crowd, there are these films with following squeezed into this group of twenty. Get the Jackass-guys-are-reincarnated-Buster-Keaton guys out here, the Southland Tales apologists, the Final Destination groupies, the Goon squad. I like Goon. I could be part of the Goon squad. All the same, this is a filmography of a man who cashed in playing the same guy over and over again until he aged out of the part entirely. I was watching Elstree 1976 recently, a documentary about the people who filled in the edges of the camera in the original Star Wars. Angus MacInnes, who probably gets as much screen time with his actual face as anyone else interviewed for the doc, says that character actors like him have an expiration date. Eventually leading men aren’t cast as leading men anymore, he says, and they fall back into supporting work or character work. Where does that leave a guy like me? Seann William Scott is the same age as Ryan Reynolds. Seann William Scott has been unable to leverage bro comedy with the success that Ryan Reynolds leveraged bro comedy, and that is why he will be a footnote to a footnote. I really do like Goon.
8) Dakota Johnson
Dakota Johnson’s filmography baffles. Star with the Fifty Shades movies and get put on your butt when you see Bad Times at the El Royale. The Suspiria remake, which I just loathe but which speaks an earnestness for a good part, is literally sitting next to Madame Web. There’s that wonderful one-scene performance in The Social Network, by and large playing a young woman who is, well, baffled. There’s some indie stuff here; I didn’t like The Lost Daughter either, but I believed her performance in the movie. Is Dakota Johnson a wooden doll? Is she the Monica Vitta of trashy cinema? Is she a couple sparking supporting roles away from reinventing herself? Is she going to ride into the sunset on a jetpack?
7) Gal Gadot
Dour films for a dour performer. Like watching Robert Patrick’s Terminator but with no apprehension that she might do something terrifying or spectacular. Branagh’s Poirot movies have delighted in taking au courant action heroine, like Gadot in Death on the Nile or Daisy Ridley in Murder on the Orient Express, and placing them in situations where they are forced to be genteel or whimsical. Gadot’s films hurt when you flick them, and reverberate with the hollowness inside.
6) Tom Holland
We’ll get to Holland, but he’s there in two films I feel very warmly about: The Lost City of Z and In the Heart of the Sea. I don’t typically rewatch movies but I am sure that I’ll return to both one day for the pure pleasure of them. Anyway, Tom Holland catches a lot of flak for suggesting that he’s been in serious movies like Cherry and The Devil All the Time, and thus he’s got a sense of what Martin Scorsese is doing over on his end. I hope he catches more. Watching a Tom Holland movie is like participating in a flagging conversation with a half-acquaintance, reaching for familiarity but not really caring what the answer is, because you’ve smalltalked your way in and out of this situation countless times. I have this pet theory that the world would be a happier, better place if Batman had never been created. In the same mold, I think Tom Holland is the worst thing to happen to any major superhero in the transition to the screen. What makes Spider-Man a pitiable joy is entirely missing in the six MCU movies up there, replaced with a smug security that doesn’t fit the character in the least.
5) Ashton Kutcher
Everyone who we’ll see after Kutcher is there because there is a magnitude to the badness of their filmography. Kutcher, even if he has the name recognition that Malin Akerman and Matthew Goode don’t have, is lodged so firmly into a filmography that doesn’t matter that it’s tough to be upset about it. This might just as well be twenty black rectangles. I remember seeing the ads for The Guardian and thinking, “Wow, we don’t get a lot of Coast Guard movies.”
4) Dwayne Johnson
We’ve reached a point where I’m starting to feel some of the despair I felt looking at Ryan Reynolds’ filmography.
There’s a pretty good chance that Moana is the best movie we’re going to get from here on out. I guess people’s mileage will differ with the Fast and the Furious movies, but for the life of me I struggle to think of an action star whose films all feel so anonymous. (Can you think of another one? Does Johnson even have bits?) There was that meme a while back which shows the Rock in the same outfit in four different movies. It’s all kind of just the same movie, including the fact that so many of these are Fast and the Furious sequels which really are kind of all the same movie. Johnson isn’t a master of stunts; casting him is the stunt on its own, as if he is the only musclebound fellow available, and we are all awed by him as we could not be awed by any other large man who eats a lot and works out a ton.
3) Eddie Redmayne
I’m a snob. I thought Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them was steaming garbage. I have eyes and ears. The Trial of the Chicago 7 was an affront to both. If we’re only mostly doing Jennifer’s Body apologia, I cannot get to the point of Jupiter Ascending apologia. The Good Nurse, even if it’s not at all like most of the giant-sized stuff that we see Redmayne in, is the kind of film which has pretensions. Directed by a guy who directed a Best Foreign Language nominee, starring a Best Actor and a Best Actress winner, a story taken from the headlines, backed with a Netflix documentary to go with the film. It’s not inconceivable that Netflix picked this one up and, looking at that information, might have thought they had an Oscar contender on their hands. It’s a film where Redmayne never strikes the right note for his character, which seems to be a running gag for the guy.
2) James Corden
You know what’s really amazing? We haven’t seen Cats until just now. (Rebel Wilson missed the cut, and not by a lot.) I know I’ve had some repeats in here, what with The Aeronauts counting for Redmayne and Jones, Dude, Where’s My Car? for Kutcher and Scott, Onward for Holland and Pratt, the MCU stuff, the Fast and the Furious sequels. Corden’s coming in hot with stuff like Ocean’s 8, Into the Woods, The Prom, Cinderella, and of course, Cats. (Most of these pages have something I’m fond of regardless, and here’s Corden’s: the Kevin Bacon game stalwart Starter for 10.) You’ll notice that he’s not dominating space on the posters; I think even Seann William Scott gets more real estate on his Letterboxd page than Corden does. There are blockbusters, but as bad as Corden is in some of this stuff, and as bad as the movies are, the movies aren’t united as Corden joints. If I didn’t know this was a page of Corden’s top 20 on Letterboxd, it would have taken me a minute to figure out who the uniting factor was. There’s some wreckage here, but it’s not enough to take the top spot.
1b) Ryan Reynolds
Then sings my soul,
“Here’s his filmography:
A great wet fart
A great wet fart.”
1a) Kevin James
I put my pants on one leg at a time like everyone else, and I don’t sit around imbibing arthouse stuff day in and day out. But even when I’m just not in the mood for a movie that will fill me with awe, I still have never said to myself, “You know what I need today? A Kevin James movie.” It’s not as sickening to the heart as Ryan Reynolds’ twenty, but the quality here is just real, real low.
Seeing Things Secondhand 