7 actors who agreed with terrible reviews

With director Matthew Cullen reacting to the record-breaking flop of his adaptation of Martin Amis’ London Fields by saying he agrees with all the bad reviews, it got us reminiscing about all the other super-honest movie people who have ‘fessed up to bad films.

Sometimes, they sound harsher than the critics who reviewed their projects so poorly. Here’s a handful of our favourites.

Brad Pitt – The Devil’s Own

“A cobbled-together mess of conflicting tones,” said TheMovieReport on The Devil’s Own’s release, and Brad Pitt was inclined to indirectly agree.

“Well, we had a great script but it got tossed for various reasons. To have to make something up as you go along—Jesus, what pressure! It was ridiculous. It was the most irresponsible bit of filmmaking—if you can even call it that—that I’ve ever seen.”

Sylvester Stallone – Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot

“I laughed occasionally, but in pain,” The Spectator said. Star Stallone concurred that his film had pain-delivering properties and should be used as a method of torture. Seriously.

“I made some truly awful movies. Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot was the worst,” Stallone said. “If you ever want someone to confess to murder, just make him or her sit through that film. They will confess to anything after 15 minutes.”

Mickey Rourke – Passion Play

Mickey Rourke got one step ahead of his critics by bemoaning Passion Play, a film in which he has an affair with a stripper with angel wings played by Megan Fox (it’s a weird film, okay?), before it was even released, saying it was: “Terrible. Another terrible movie. But, you know, in your career and all the movies you make, you’re going to make dozens of terrible ones.”

Critics agreed (even if they didn’t think Rourke went far enough in his description): “Mickey Rourke recently made headlines for dubbing Passion Play a terrible movie,’ a proclamation that’s ultimately most notable for its understatement,” the L.A. Weekly said.

Shia LaBeouf – Transformers 2

“It is as if Michael Bay was saying ‘You think I’ve blown stuff up before? Ha-ha. Wait till you see this,” said At the Movies, which is a pretty typical statement about a film so bad, even the people involved hate it.

Shia LaBeouf eloquently expanded on the above reaction, almost as if he’d read it. “We got lost,” he said. “We tried to get bigger. It’s what happens to sequels. It’s like, how do you top the first one? You’ve got to go bigger. Mike [Bay] went so big that it became too big, and I think you lost the anchor of the movie… You lost a bit of the relationships. Unless you have those relationships, then the movie doesn’t matter. Then it’s just a bunch of robots fighting each other.”

Sam Worthington – Terminator Salvation

“A shambolic, deafening, intelligence-insulting mess, a crushing failure on almost all counts,” Time Out said.

Worthington agreed on the intelligence-insulting front, though he actually thought the film should have been LOUDER.

“If there was a big ten-ton robot coming outside that gas station, surely we would f**king hear it!” he said. “And I missed that! So I go, ‘I gotta be a bit better when I’m looking through my scripts!’ So that kind of raises my games a bit, because I feel like an idiot for not saying it to McG.”

Jennifer Lawrence – Passengers

“Passengers is a movie that starts out intriguing enough before descending towards some of the creepiest storytelling decisions in a long time but with a desperate need to somehow justify the unjustifiable,” said FanBoyNation.

Star Jennifer Lawrence seemed to have looked at the film in a new light following these kinds of criticisms. To be fair, the film does have a plot where the male love interest feels more like a stalker than someone anyone would actually want to date.

“I’m disappointed in myself that I didn’t spot it. I thought the script was beautiful – it was this tainted, complicated love story. It definitely wasn’t a failure. I’m not embarrassed by it by any means. There was just stuff that I wished I’d looked into deeper before jumping on.”

Mark Wahlberg – The Happening

Let’s face it, no-one likes The Happening, for way too many to list here.

Comedy movie site The Shiznit found fault in the film’s star. “Wahlberg is atrocious, as wooden as the trees terrorising him.”

Marky Mark’s response? “F**king trees, man. The plants. F**k it.”

We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.

Read more
Stars return for ‘The Hitman’s Bodyguard’ sequel
Tom Hanks on why he struggled to record Toy Story 4
Spielberg admits the end of ‘War of the Worlds’ was rubbish