Movies That Were Ruined By Bad Acting

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is to Gareth Edwards' 2014 monster movie Godzilla as one red sock is to a load of lily-white laundry: While he doesn't appear all that hazardous, just one member of a larger group, he has the power to spoil everything around him — and you won't notice it until it's too late. As U.S. Navy lieutenant Ford Brody, Taylor-Johnson was unenthusiastic and bankrupt of any semblance of empathy. Those attributes would be great for, say, a sociopathic villain in a superhero film or a robot featured on an episode of Black Mirror, but they're in no way befitting of a lead character in a mega monster movie. 

"Whenever he's asked to lend dramatic weight to the story, he fails miserably," Salon's Nico Lang said of Taylor-Johnson. "[His] pained attempts to emote were met with laughter from the audience."

Now, Taylor-Johnson isn't a bad actor — just take a look at his Golden Globe-winning work in the Tom Ford thriller Nocturnal Animals — but he was atypically abysmal in Godzilla, simultaneously "moronic," "brain-dead," and unremarkable in his own scenes and grossly overshadowed in the moments he shared with his on-screen father, Bryan Cranston's Joe Brody.

As the central star of a movie all about the King of Monsters, Taylor-Johnson should have given a royally sharp performance. Instead, the only thing he slayed was the film itself.