Film flopped? Maybe you did a Pacino

Critics become crueller when actors decide to put paycheques first, an analysis of acclaim shows. Jack Malvern reports.

During a career in which he has embodied the ruthlessness of the New York mafia and the devil himself, Al Pacino has also come to represent another Hollywood archetype.

The actor, who came to prominence in 1972 in The Godfather, is an example of a star whose films have almost invariably become worse as his career has progressed.

A statistical analysis of Pacino’s films shows that he is part of a club of actors who, through bad luck or fading ambition, have steadily lost the critical acclaim they had in their youth.

Pacino, 79, admitted in November that he took well-paid roles despite knowing the film would be ‘‘a lemon’’.

‘‘Sometimes they offer you money to do something that’s not adequate,’’ he said in an interview with GQ. ‘‘And you talk yourself into it.

And somewhere within you, you know that this thing is gonna be a lemon. But then when it comes full circle and you see it . . . you say, ‘If I can just get this to be a mediocre film . . .’, and you get excited by that.’’

The admission prompted film analyst and producer Stephen Follows to track the acclaim for Pacino’s films over his career and compare the scores with those for 274 other leading male and female actors who have received prominent billing in at least 10 films over the past 20 years.

A scattergraph of critics’ scores for Pacino’s films, determined by review-aggregating website Metacritic, showed an identifiable downward trajectory.

The consistency of an actor’s rise and fall can be determined using the Pearson coefficient, which awards a score of one to a career in which each film was better than the last. Actors whose films

Biggest drops . . .