THE B (AS IN BAD) LIST
Study reveals actors in worst-reviewed movies of the past two decades
It could have been Good Luck Chuck that gave you your first taste. Or perhaps it was Valentine’s Day that hooked you — you’re a romantic that way.
Whatever your access point, if you’ve watched a Jessica Alba movie at pretty much any point in her career, you’ve seen a chain of critical badness unprecedented in the modern era, according to a new report.
Alba lands on the rare Hollywood list that nobody wants to be on: Actors in the worst-reviewed movies of the past 20 years.
The report, compiled by the London-based SEO firm Verve on behalf of British comparison-research site Go Compare, aims to offer statistical evidence of something we all sense: There are some actors who just seem to turn out one flop after another.
The report saw Alba average a Metacritic score of 39.0 for the movies she starred in during the preceding two decades. That’s only slightly better than the male performer with the worst-reviewed movies of the modern era: Mike Epps.
The former comedian averaged 38.3, a numeric representation of what many people who watched Resident Evil: Extinction or The Hangover Part III, both Epps-starrers, felt upon seeing those films. (Metacritic is the popular review site that assigns mathematical values first to a critic’s review and then to a movie as a whole.)
Epps narrowly edged out longtime character actor Kevin Pollak — average Metacritic score: 38.5 — for the top spot.
In fact, only five per cent of the movies starring Epps, Pollak and Alba were given overall positive reviews. Verve defined positive reviews as any movie that had a Metacritic score of at least 60 per cent.
“You’d think these actors would have a hard time getting work making one badly reviewed movie after another,” said Verve’s James Barnes, who helped conduct the study. “But this shows how hard it is for producers to find veteran actors. And that critics aren’t the end all and be all of casting decisions.”
To conduct the study, Verve looked at every actor who’s had at least 20 live-action roles in the past 20 years. Then it crunched their Metacritic scores to come up with an average, landing on Epps on the male side and Alba on the female.
And if you think, “Well, I’m safe, I like the other Jessica,” rest not comfortably: Jessica Biel finished in second behind Alba, thanks to such non-Smithsonian-esque work as The A-Team, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry and Powder Blue. You’d have been better off rallying behind Jessica Rabbit.
And while Biel did manage to crack the 40 per cent threshold — her average Metacritic score was 41.6 per cent — she has a lower percentage of outright positive movies than anyone on the list with just four per cent.
Rounding out the list of males were a few performers who’ve starred in some not-exactly-stellar romantic comedies or action movies over the years: Josh Duhamel, Robin Williams and Gerard Butler.
Williams, you ask? Didn’t the late actor win an Oscar for Good Will Hunting and was nominated three other times? Yes, the very same. But also the actor who, sadly, scored a “Razzie hat trick” for Jakob the Liar, Bicentennial Man and Death to Smoochy. All of the nominations from that ignoble prize came in the 2000s, within the field of study, while many of his Oscar-decorated works fell before it.
On the actress side, Heather Graham, Radha Mitchell and Kathy Bates took slots three to five. Bates would seem a surprise in her own right: She’s been nominated for an Oscar on three occasions, and even won best actress for Misery.
But in recent years she also has acted in a host of less estimable fare. You May Not Kiss The Bride. The Great Gilly Hopkins. P.S. I Love You.
P.S. Butler was also in that film. P.P.S. Bates, like Alba and Biel, was in Valentine’s Day.
And Butler and Biel themselves co-starred in Playing for Keeps, a soccer romantic dramedy with a Metacritic score of 27. Badness is a community.
The lesson is that while working may be good for the bank account and the acting muscles, it can really drag your average down. (Barnes acknowledged that, since there are generally more badly reviewed movies than good ones, the survey can be punitive to those who work more.)
Of course, an actor can give a good performance in a bad movie too — sometimes their performance looks better in a bad movie, rising above the tripe that surrounds.
The study also underlined a gender gap: On the top-15 list of actresses are well-regarded performers including Amanda Seyfried, Dakota Fanning and Jennifer Aniston.
That speaks to how hard it can be even for talented actresses to get good roles, Barnes said, and also to the fact that there are more roles for men in general, which allowed A-list male names to be sheltered in ways top females were not.