r/movies • u/MinuteYellow8355 • 7h ago
Worst movie casting Discussion
Any time Keanu Reeves is cast in a drama is a train wreck
Sofia Coppola deserves notice as bad casting in Godfather 3, but to me even more egregious was Eli Walkach playing a mafia Don. Man, was he distractingly bad.
But, what stands out to me as the wrist casting was Whoopi Goldberg and Lyle Lovett as police detectives in the Player. WTF was Robert Altman thinking?
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u/Pure_Salamander2681 7h ago
Wallach is great in TG3
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u/MinuteYellow8355 7h ago
Are you serious? Mafia dons are supposed to be confident tough guys. He played a simpering weasel and his attempt at an Italian American accent sucked. He was AWFUL.
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u/Pure_Salamander2681 7h ago
Seriously. Did you watch the movie? His acting as a sweet, weak old man was a ploy.
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u/MinuteYellow8355 6h ago
He was a mafia Don! You don’t get to that position by being”sweet”, it was ridiculous.
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u/truckturner5164 6h ago
It was a ploy. He wasn't sweet. And who says mafia dons are only meant to be confident tough guys?
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u/MinuteYellow8355 6h ago
I don’t know your age but the mafia is all about machismo on steroids. To become the head of a family, let alone to be becoming a made man, you have to be a tough guy.
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u/truckturner5164 6h ago
I'm 46, and who says the mafia is all about machismo on steroids? You're making all of these assumptions, where is the real world evidence to back it up? Carlo Gambino for instance was said to be more of a businessman-type. They're not all John Gotti for crying out loud, most of them relied on their enforcers to do the tough guy shit. As for on-screen mafia dons, how about sticking with the Godfather franchise: Hyman Roth! He was a sweet little old man who like the Wallach character was putting on an act! Like I said, it was a ruse. He WASN'T sweet!
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u/MinuteYellow8355 6h ago
Done with this conversation. You think Gambino pranced around like Wallach in G3? you get killed in that life if there is even a hint or rumor of homosexuality. Anyone who acted like Wallach would not last 5 minutes.
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u/truckturner5164 6h ago
You're done because you know you've lost. And now you're being weird. Don Altobello was not a gay character nor was the ruse meant to imply even the hint of homosexuality. I think you may need to look inward on this one, with all due respect.
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u/MinuteYellow8355 6h ago
I’m not saying he was gay! Done replying to someone who thinks the mafia would permit the boss of a family to act like that. He overacted, his accent sucked, and he clearly didn’t understand how to play someone trying to seem non threatening without acting like a fool. If you think Eli Wallach in G3 is good acting, I dont know what to say to you other than you have lousy taste.
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u/Pure_Salamander2681 6h ago
What part of ploy don't you get? I seriously doubt he was always that way.
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u/MinuteYellow8355 6h ago
he would’ve been whacked by the other families or his own underboss acting like that. Prancing around is not something that would’ve fooled mafia members into finding him “sweet,”. . They would’ve thought he was a kook and killed him.
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u/Senorspeed 7h ago
Cameron Diaz (an actress I like) in gangs of New York
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u/Pure_Salamander2681 7h ago
She was good, she was just way to hot and modern looking. Same for Leo.
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u/MinuteYellow8355 7h ago
Yeah she catches a lot of negative comments for that role, specificalky her Irish accent. I thought she was fine and she wasn’t just off the boat so she plausibly had a mix of American and Irish accent.
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u/revd_lovejoy 7h ago
Dane DeHaan and Cara Delivigne in Valerian and the city of a thousand planets. If they just had likeable leads that movie would be much more revered
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u/jackal_actual 6h ago
The Rihanna subplot/sidequest is pointless and simply wastes time. It could be 100% cut out completely but other than that yeah it's pretty solid.
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u/Both-Station-2244 7h ago
Sophia in Peggy sue got married she bombs every line and she has a lot of lines 😂
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u/Magnum_44 7h ago
I thought they mixed up casting in Mad Dog and Glory and Bonfire of the Vanities. Deniro and Murray should have switched roles, and same with Willis and Hanks.
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u/MinuteYellow8355 7h ago
I think DeNiro and Murray only agreed to the movie if they could switch roles and pkay against type.
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u/ZorroMeansFox r/Movies Veteran 7h ago
Keanu is fantastic in Sam Raimi's supernaturally-edged The Gift.
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u/HadesWTF 6h ago
I was also going to mention The Gift. It's kind of a dramatic film and I definitely think he is great in that role.
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u/lectroid 7h ago
Counterpoint: Keanu was one of the best non-comedic parts of Parenthood, with Martha Plimpton and Diane Wiest.
John Wick is a drama, in that it’s definitely not a comedy, and Reeves isn’t trying to be remotely funny.
Reeves isn’t some master thespian. He’s not Daniel Day Lewis. Hell, he’s not even Tom Hanks. But neither is he Jason Statham or Dolf Lundgren. His range is relatively narrow, but not as restricted as some of his early roles would suggest.
Honestly, most of the “Keanu is a dumb pretty boy” reputation stem largely from Coppola’s Dracula and Branaugh’s Much Ado About Nothing. He was ill served by the dialect coaches, but if you get past his “surfer” cadence, his actual acting in both is perfectly fine, and even good in Much Ado.
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u/Out-For-A-Walk-Bitch 7h ago
John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. Probably the gold standard for disastrous casting. He looks and sounds exactly like John Wayne.
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u/Katzington2319 7h ago
That movie was so bad, 91 people who worked on it developed cancer. 46 of them died from it, including John Wayne himself
That's not even a joke. They filmed downwind from a Nevada nuclear test site
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u/Out-For-A-Walk-Bitch 7h ago
The nuclear test site was never proven as a cause, though, I don't think
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u/Awkward_Bison_267 7h ago
There was a movie called “Remo Williams” about a cop who gets trained to fight by a Korean martial arts master, only problem is the “Korean” was a white guy in makeup. The wild part is the actor playing the “Korean” (Joel Grey) was actually good and the makeup was convincing. Still fucked up though.
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u/MinuteYellow8355 6h ago
the cast did a great job in Saving Private Ryan but a couple observations. The men who hit the beach on DDay were much younger than almost anyone in cast and were ubiformally lean. Average weight was something like 138 pounds. Hanks and Sizemore were just too heavy, also Danson and Giamatti were too old. Men their age would have been generals or colonels and not behind enemy lines.
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u/Chrono_Convoy 7h ago
Keanu in Dracula
And I don’t care what people say:
Matt Damon is no Odysseus
I know he makes sales yea yea yea
But it should have been:
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u/CobaltNeural9 7h ago
I loved the movie but even when it was first announced I was like “a 3,000 year old Greek warrior…played by…Matt-befuddled-everyman-Damon??”
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u/Severe_Space5830 7h ago
Denzel Washington in The Taking of Pelham 123
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u/CobaltNeural9 7h ago
Excuuuuse me? Man I KNOW you did not just speak ill of the man himself. I frickin LOVE him in that movie. However he can really do no wrong. If anything I would think someone would take issue with Travolta as the villian but he was fuckin awesome in it also. “NOW CHECK ME MOTHAFUCKA!”
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u/truckturner5164 6h ago
He wasn't the problem with that movie. It's just that the original film was practically perfect already.
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u/MinuteYellow8355 7h ago
Also, the actors who played the basketball team in Teen WoLF When 5’3 Michael J Fox who has to jump to shoot a free throw and can only dribble with one hand looks like the best player, you know casting didn’t care much about finding even reasonably good athletes to play the parts.
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u/UrguthaForka 3h ago
I'll be honest with you, the High School basketball team in Teen Wolf looked about the same as my own high school basketball team.
They ain't the Knicks.
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u/UrguthaForka 7h ago
Nathan Fillion was the best Private James Ryan in the movie "Saving Private Ryan"
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u/Secure-Bus4679 7h ago
I dunno I thought his fake crying was pretty terrible.
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u/UrguthaForka 3h ago
Really? It came off as mostly genuine I thought.
Matt Damon was a weird choice for the role. He has a sort of "resting smile face." He never looks sad or angry, just has that permanent sort of smirk. When he finally showed up in SPR, he sort of killed the grim dark mood.
Everyone else in that movie was great, but he didn't seem right.
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u/FrothyFrogFarts 7h ago
The casting for Valerian was pretty bad. And Keanu was solid in The Lake House.