8. Colin Farrell as Bullseye in “Daredevil” (2003)
One of the nicest things you could say about Mark Steven Johnson’s “Daredevil” is that it’s inconsistently cast. Few would pick Ben Affleck as their ideal choice for the blind superhero, but Michael Clarke Duncan was inspired as villain The Kingpin. Jennifer Garner was a bit insipid as Elektra, but people like Joe Pantoliano and Jon Favreau did some solid work in supporting roles. And in theory, then-rising star Colin Farrell, fresh off a good job as an antagonist in “Minority Report,” could have been fun as fan-favorite villain Bullseye, a man so accurate he can kill someone with a peanut. He certainly seems to be having a good time, chewing scenery like it was made of toffee. But the whole thing’s just kind of misjudged. Farrell brings a kind of white-rapper swagger to the part, but a House of Pain kind of swagger, and it comes across as campy and cheesy rather than ‘cool,’ which is what it seems to be going for. The look is also pretty botched: as was the vogue, Farrell doesn’t wear the costume from the comics, which isn’t necessarily a bad decision, except that the bald-head/target score combination conspires to literally make Farrell look like a dick. Dodgy accent aside, it’s not the actor’s fault: everyone in this movie is so adrift that you can’t blame him so much. But it’s still a huge waste of what could have been a very memorable adversary.
7. Peter Sarsgaard as Hector Hammond in “Green Lantern” (2011)
Ok, so there is an element of shooting fish in a barrel when we target anything to do with the widely reviled and inarguably shit “Green Lantern,” but some fish really do deserve two in the head, just to be sure they’re really dead. On paper, Hector Hammond seems a fairly promising adversary, in the odd, ephemeral universe of ‘Green Lantern’ that is — infected by some sort of fear essence which magnifies his latent feelings of resentment and inadequacy toward his father, Hammond becomes telepathic and telekinetic, and perhaps understandably, as a result, insane and psychotic. But a universe in which Will is a source of power and Fear is a Yellow Energy that can be passed on from the Fear Entity Parallax, or something, needs some nifty storytelling chops to sell, and some sympathetic and relatable characterization to ground the frou-frou. None of which we get here as Sarsgaard morphs from a guy with a tragically receding hairline into a tic-laden grotesque with a pulsating, bulbous forehead, who resembles the Elephant Man without the pathos and whose motivations, especially once his hated father is dead, are a complete mystery to us, and who the script pretty much abandons in the final act anyway. And that’s not to mention the bad taste left by a film whose moral is essentially that the buff, popular, jock fighter pilot dude will always win out over the socially inept brainbox.
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