Image via Complex Original
Looking back on his resume, it’s hard to imagine that Colin Farrell was once pegged as Hollywood’s next big thing. Yet, flash back to the early 2000s, read some of the press that surrounded his movies and paparazzi-friendly social life, and you’ll be reminded of the Irish actor’s clout following his breakthrough performance in the Vietnam War drama Tigerland, released in 2000. After receiving a few prestigious honors, namely the London Film Critics Award for Newcomer of the Year, Farrell became the industry’s go-to guy for big studio fare. The possibilities for where his career could go were endless.
Eleven years later, though, he’s one of modern-day cinema’s biggest underachievers. It’s not right to say that he’s a failure—in the midst of his crappier movies, Farrell has done strong work in winning flicks such as Minority Report, The New World, and In Bruges. But, unfortunately, such noteworthy achievements have been overshadowed by his predominant slate of horrible films and off-screen antics (getting sloppy drunk, smashing tons of famous chicks, and other activities we wish were our daily routines).
Despite his shoddy track record, there’s still hope for Farrell, who’s by no means an old, washed-up sob story. Today is his birthday, and he’s only turning a youthful—in Hollywood terms—35 years old. So, we’re here to remind Farrell of his 10 worst movies, in hopes of instilling the fear of any more epic fails into his mind. Or, at the least, we’re about to blast a guy who’s sullied great potential and made us suffer through some truly awful films. The latter seems more appropriate.
Miami Vice
10. MIAMI VICE (2006)
Initially, the prospect of Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral) directing a modern-day spin on Miami Vice, the classic '80s cop show that he himself produced, sounded like a great idea. But then came the realization that Mann’s films are deathly serious and violently dark—two things that the old Don Johnson/Philip Michael Thomas Vice definitely wasn’t. And, even more detrimental, the pairing of Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx as detectives Crockett and Tubbs, respectively. A once-nifty idea quickly turned sour.
Cluttered with gun-fights and outbursts of violence, Miami Vice is so action-oriented—much like all of Mann’s films—that there’s hardly any space for the characters to develop multifaceted personalities, or even chemistry.
Based on the scenes in which Farrell and Foxx do actually get to play off one another, however, we’re inclined to think that Mann strategically loaded the flick with action as a distraction. When seen alongside one another, the actors have an odd rigidity between them, as if each scene is their first one together. Or they’re just as disappointed at how far removed Miami Vice is from the lighthearted and fun TV show as we are.
Hart's War
9. HART’S WAR (2002)
Director Gregory Hoblit gets points for attempting to make a unique war movie, but, with the overstuffed Hart’s War, he reached a bit too far. Part battle showcase, part courtroom drama, and part man-on-a-mission procedural, this serviceable yet mostly disappointing pic is unable to provide a single narrative arc worth caring about.
Farrell plays the film’s protagonist, a Harvard lawyer who signs up for World War II combat but gets taken prisoner by the Nazis and becomes embroiled in a murder trial alongside a seasoned prisoner (Bruce Willis) and Tuskegee airman turned defendant (Terrence Howard). The most interesting thing about Hart’s War is the film’s racial undertones, but Hoblit’s unsure flick never dwells on one idea long enough to sustain such interest.
Phone Booth
8. PHONE BOOTH (2002)
Phone Booth didn’t have to suck. On paper, the Joel Schumacher-directed thriller has an intriguing premise: Presented in “real time,” it’s about a douchebag publicist (played by our boy Farrell) who answers a random payphone, is greeted by a sniper, and told that he’ll be shot if he ends the call. Only 80 minutes long, Phone Booth is just the right length, yet its brevity is wasted by a ridiculous performance from Sir Farrell and a brainless script.
To be fair, Farrell isn’t the biggest problem in Phone Booth; yes, his laughable “New Yawk” accent is distractingly bad, but the miscasting could be overlooked if he wasn’t in such a ludicrous movie. In order to expand the single-setting movie’s scope, Schumacher resorts to an overly busy assortment of split screens, slow-motion, and mini-pictures-within-the-big-picture devices; the cops on the scene allow a mob-sized crowd to hang around the phone booth the entire time, and, worst of all, the entire film boils down to a morality lesson that culminates with Farrell sobbing through apologies to people to whom he really hasn’t done anything that bad.
For such a short movie, Phone Booth does an awful lot wrong.
The Recruit
7. THE RECRUIT (2003)
One can see the attraction Farrell had to The Recruit, a project that allowed the then-on-the-rise actor to spar with big screen great Al Pacino. Seemingly blinded by such a grand opportunity, Farrell neglected to realize that the script was a what’s-what of CIA movie clichés and that Pacino already made an identical movie six years earlier, The Devil’s Advocate, only that one had horror elements, a naked Charlize Theron, and wasn’t completely devoid of original thought.
Farrell plays a computer whiz recruited by Pacino’s character to join the CIA, and that’s where the familiarity begins. You’ve got a supermodel-looking fellow trainee (Bridget Moynahan) who becomes a love interest, a subplot involving Farrell’s dead father and daddy’s connections to son’s new place of employment, unnecessary car chases, and obvious late-game twists—all standard components for CIA cinema, though done with even less ingenuity than before.
The aftermath: Farrell’s star power rose as Pacino’s credibility began its downward spiral into Righteous Kill/88 Minutes territory. A double loss for us all.
Ask The Dust
6. ASK THE DUST (2006)
Check out Colin Farrell’s character’s name in this lifeless period romance: Arturo Bandini. If that’s not a good enough clue to indicate how miscast the un-suave Irishman is in Ask The Dust, maybe Farrell’s career-long inability to deliver a subtle performance will make one question his presence in a talky and nuanced drama of this kind.
Or, you can just watch the flick and witness the awkwardness for yourselves, though we wouldn’t advise it. His character is a struggling writer who enters a torrid affair with a sultry Mexican waitress (Salma Hayek), which leads to ruminations on racism, a shortage of chemistry between Farrell and Hayek, and an obligatory “Salma-Hayek skinny-dipping” scene that’s not nearly as satisfying as one would hope.
For that last crime alone, Ask The Dust deserves constant ridicule, not the anonymity that it’s earned through mediocrity. Don’t act like you knew this Farrell-starring snooze existed prior to reading this.
Pride & Glory
5. PRIDE & GLORY (2008)
Though this is a list centered on Colin Farrell’s biggest career fails, let’s shift our attention to someone else for a moment: his Pride & Glory co-star Edward Norton. Once one of Hollywood’s most interesting and reliable actors, Norton’s project choices over the last few years have been curiously dire, and this paint-by-numbers cop procedural is perhaps his lamest misfire.
Norton and Farrell play law enforcement officers butting heads over their department’s shady practices; to find out what those dirty tactics are exactly, just watch every “corrupt police” movie made prior to 2008 (Serpico, for starters). In order to compensate for its sheer lack of originality and wit, Pride & Glory has its unfortunate stars dropping an obscene amount of F-bombs, namely Farrell, whose overacting is made all the more clear by Norton’s solid, if not utterly wasted, performance.
A few more uninspired slogs such as Pride & Glory and Norton might earn his own “worst movies” list of this kind. Let’s hope not—Farrell doesn’t need the company.
S.W.A.T.
4. S.W.A.T. (2003)
By the end of the police thriller S.W.A.T., three truths are revealed: Director Clark Johnson can’t film coherent action scenes, Samuel L. Jackson really will take any paycheck, and Colin Farrell is no action movie hero. In a role that should’ve went to co-star Jeremy Renner, had Hollywood known then that he’d become the Oscar-nominated stud he is today, Farrell’s lack of charisma causes him to evaporate off the viewer’s radar.
Instead, S.W.A.T. watchers are stuck with an incredibly lame villain (unintimidating French actor Olivier Martinez) and a final act full of unintelligible shootouts. Bullet-ridden bodies hit the floor at a brisk pace, yet it’s a task to discern who’s been shot and who did the shooting. Not that we even care.
Alexander
3. ALEXANDER (2004)
Oliver Stone’s disastrous biopic on Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great has so many things wrong with it that it seems unfair to cast the heaviest blame on Farrell’s lead performance, but, fuck it, the undeniably miscast actor deserves the scorn.
Alexander is the most glaring example of Farrell’s inability to carry a movie; asked to exude both macho presence and layered gravitas, he stumbles through Stone’s catastrophe with neither intact. And boy does the audience get to watch Farrell stumble—at nearly three hours long, Alexander plays like an extended study in how not to cast a cinematic epic.
Daredevil
2. DAREDEVIL (2003)
Lest we be accused of completely bashing Farrell here, we’ll start off our prerequisite Daredevil bashing with this compliment: He’s the second best thing about one of the worst superhero movies ever made. Which isn’t exactly something to be proud of, but, hey, it’s better than nothing.
As scene-stealing assassin Bullseye, who kills folks with everything from knives to airplane peanuts, Farrell appears to be having a blast reciting obnoxious dialogue (“You’re good, baby. But me? I’m magic.”) and upstaging an uncharismatic and bored-looking Ben Affleck (who plays the titular hero). Daredevil director Mark Steven Johnson tried to make a darker and more violent comic book flick, but the end result is a mess that can’t decide whether it’s a second-rate action film or a tepid romantic drama focused on Affleck and Jennifer Garner (as Elektra, star of her own equally bad spinoff movie).
Either way, both halves of Daredevil’s schizophrenic approach are ineptly made and infuriating to both Marvel Comics fans and Farrell’s haters. It’s hard to totally clown the guy when he’s the only semi-entertaining thing about an altogether wack movie. But it was certainly worth a try.
American Outlaws
1. AMERICAN OUTLAWS (2001)
If Young Guns pissed off Sergio Leone fanboys, then this insultingly sanitized Western flick must’ve had them reloading their six-shooters in vengeful anger. American Outlaws takes revisionist history into shameful directions, the worst being how it presents 1860s Missouri as a land full of frat-boy types and perfectly manicured faces. The last time we checked, the old West was a place for grizzled old salts who’d crack whiskey bottles over the heads of pretty-boy-types like Colin Farrell.
Playing real-life outlaw Jesse James, Farrell signed onto American Outlaws right at the beginning of his next-big-thing phase, so it’s actually quite impressive that he somehow managed to still have a career in its wake. American Outlaws is more Tiger Beat than Cormac McCarthy, turning James and his gang of bank robbers into an assembly line of bland poster-boys designed for teenage girls who think The Good, The Bad, The Ugly is a hairstyle column in Cosmopolitan.