The Worst Movies Made By Oscar-Winning Actors

Al Pacino's acting chops don't need to be mentioned here – he's Michael Corleone, Sonny Wortzik, Tony Montana, and so many more legendary characters. Pacino won the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing Lt. Col. Frank Slade in Scent of A Woman, and he's been nominated for eight other films. The man is a true Hollywood legend, but for some reason, he felt compelled to join Adam Sandler in Jack and Jill. Pacino plays himself in the film, while Sandler's character, an ad executive, tries to persuade him to star in a Dunkin' Donuts commercial. Pacino becomes infatuated with Jack's twin sister Jill, played by Sandler in drag.

The film holds a 3% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Pacino, who won the Golden Raspberry for Worst Supporting Actor for his work on the film, spoke with GQ and delved into why he took the role:

You know what? I may be falling into a bad habit now. I think I’m starting to get a little perverse. I’m starting to want to do films that aren’t really very good and try to make them better. And that’s become my challenge. 

He elaborated a bit, explaining that Robert De Niro advised him to avoid inadequate movies, but he talked himself into doing them for the money and went on to explain that he would “spend a lot of time and you’re doing all these things, and you say ‘if I can just get this to be a mediocre film,’ and you get excited by that. It’s an impulse that I’ve got to just put that away now.”

Forest Whitaker's career is full of impressive roles, including performances in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Platoon, Good Morning Vietnam, and The Crying Game. He won the Oscar for playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, and has also directed films like Waiting to Exhale, Hope Floats, and First Daughter. Unfortunately, he has a stain on his filmography: Battlefield Earth. Whitaker plays Ker, one of the Psychlos, a race of malevolent aliens that are occupying Earth.

The film was a passion project for its star, John Travolta. The acting is terrible, which is saying something, given the talented cast. Based on a novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, the movie was a huge flop that lost millions upon release. It somehow managed to scrape up 3% on Rotten Tomatoes. Whitaker explained why he thought the movie didn't exactly work, though he's supportive of the project:

It's very dark in some ways as a sci-fi movie. It's also really funny because in some ways we're so villainous that it becomes humorous - I mean, we're just so ridiculously evil that it's like a joke. If it was going to be compared to something, it would be sort of like Planet Of The Apes.

Michael Caine is one of his generation's greatest actors, having appeared in everything from the Dark Knight trilogy and The Italian Job to The Man Who Would Be King and Children of Men. The man has been in a lot and received two Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor. The first came from his work in Hannah and Her Sisters, while the second came from The Cider House Rules. Additionally, he's received several more nominations and won numerous awards.

Why, you might wonder, did he star in Jaws: The Revenge, widely considered one of the worst movies ever made? Caine himself isn't bad in the film – he's a fantastic actor, and he soldiers on like a pro. Still, the film is dragged down by crummy effects and a bad script. Someone once told him as much, telling Caine, “I saw that Jaws IV. It stinks.” Caine had the perfect response:

I haven't seen it, but I've seen the house it bought my mother, and it's marvelous!

Caine was paid $1 million for his work, and he only spent two weeks filming in the Bahamas, so it couldn't have been a terrible experience for the veteran actor. (The experience for audiences is another matter.)

In his withering review of Jaws: The Revenge, Roger Ebert wrote:

There is one other thing I can’t believe about “Jaws the Revenge,” and that is that on March 30, Michael Caine passed up his chance to accept his Academy Award [for Hannah and Her Sisters] in person because of his commitment to this movie. Maybe he was thinking the same thing as the marine biologist in the movie: that if you don’t go right back in the water after something terrible happens to you, you might be too afraid to ever go back in again.

Jon Voight is an exceptionally talented actor with a stacked filmography. Some of his best work includes Midnight Cowboy, Runaway Train, Deliverance, Heat, and Mission: Impossible. He won an Academy Award for playing a paraplegic Vietnam veteran in 1978's Coming Home and received nominations for some of the aforementioned films.

Looking through his films, you might ask yourself what possessed him to sign on for Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, a movie so bad it earned a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. Voight, who played villainous TV mogul Bill Biscane, sat for an interview with Paul Fischer in 2004, explaining what attracted him to the role:

I’ll tell you, Paul, when you look around the world, everybody’s really in a fearful state in some way, and kids are getting that, they’re getting that fear, and they need to be given a kind of empowerment in some sense. I mean, little kids, they’ll get it. And this script offered, this script was for kids, it’s for little kids – four, five, six, seven. And these little guys, and when the first movie came out, these little kids watched it enrapt and memorized it just like other older kids would with maybe Spider-Man or something else. They see it as kind of their superhero stuff.

Ben Kingsley has proven his worth time and again. He brought Gandhi to life on the silver screen, earning himself an Oscar for Best Actor. He followed this with strong turns in numerous films, such as Schindler's List, Searching for Bobby Fischer, and Sexy Beast. (He also hilariously played himself on The Sopranos.)

Kingsley signed on for some crummy films over the years, but he always gave it his all regardless of how big or small the role he took was. Still, he stumbled a bit when he decided to play the King of the Vampires in the utterly forgettable box office bomb that was BloodRayne. The film holds a 4% on Rotten Tomatoes for its hammy acting, bad script, and silly situations. Andrea Gronvall put it succinctly in her review for the Chicago Reader:

Just when you thought camp was dead, along comes this bizarre cross between a Tarantino knockoff and a Hammer horror film.

Robert De Niro is one of those names that immediately garners respect in Hollywood. He's been in so many great films, and performed so well in them, that he's an award magnet. De Niro's impressive credits include The Godfather Part II, Raging Bull, The Deer Hunter, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Cape Fear, and The King of Comedy. De Niro won two Academy Awards for The Godfather Part II and Raging Bull, though he was nominated for seven other films.

Still, De Niro has a few bad apples in his bunch, and the worst is arguably Godsend, a movie so bad that you've probably (blessedly) never heard of it. A 2004 thriller about a bereaved couple that's persuaded by a mysterious doctor (De Niro) to clone their deceased son, Godsend received a 4% on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics tore it apart, among them Rick Gershman of the Tampa Bay Times, who called it a “God-awful mess.” Roger Ebert was similarly scathing:

For a brief time, however, I thought director Nick Hamm was using at least one original strategy. During certain tense scenes, I heard a low, ominous scraping noise, and I thought it was some kind of audible flash-forward to terrors still to come. Then I realized I was hearing carpenters at work on the floor below the screening room.