One or two missteps is understandable, but for some Hollywood stars making bad movies has become a habit. It's a bad habit they've embraced wholeheartedly because, presumably, they simply don't care. They're more interested in using their celebrity to lighten your wallet and enrich themselves in the short term, than in taking the long term risk required to develop a reputation for making something good. Audiences will catch on to their scam eventually, but in the meantime they're only a step or two above the beggar harassing passing pedestrians on your street corner. These cinematic carpetbaggers will keep right on holding their hand out as long as we continue putting money in it. Enough. We're ending it now by identifying the worst offenders. Put these actors on your ignore list. We're pretty sure that, whether or not they once did, these celebrities no longer care about movies. It can't be an accident that everything they do ends up being trash.
Ashton Kutcher has been in fourteen movies and never received a positive Rotten Tomatoes score. Not once. Ashton Kutcher has never been in anything good. Even if critics were wrong about two or three of them (and I'd say they were very wrong about The Butterfly Effect) that's still an impressive feat of awful. Something like that doesn't happen by accident, especially this far into Kutcher's filmography. These days, for unfathomable reasons, he's a big star. That means he doesn't have to do Killers, he chooses to do Killers.
Fourteen movies in to what passes for his acting career it's clear that not only does Ashton Kutcher suck, he's doing it on purpose. Ashton Kutcher is on a one man crusade to destroy the movie business by churning out one What Happens in Vegas after another. His career is a littered trail of recycled plot devices, horrible acting choices, and excessive mugging for the camera. When he's not busy banging the supernaturally de-aging Demi Moore or tweeting, he's content to cash paychecks for doing whatever shit lands in front him and happens to pay something. Or maybe he's really just this stupid. Whether through deliberately heinous choices or wholesale incompetence, it seems clear that Ashton Kutcher doesn't care about movies, all he cares about his stealing money from your wallet.
Average Rotten Tomatoes Score Since 2000: 25%
Little girls dream of growing up to be Julia Roberts. They dream of Liz Taylor being fawned over by Richard Burton, of Rita Hayworth and her movie star hair, of Audrey Hepburn and her graceful cigarette holder. They dream of being leading ladies, starring opposite handsome A-list men in the biggest, most widely-seen summer blockbusters Hollywood has to offer. Kate Hudson was undoubtedly one of those starry-eyed girls. Growing up the daughter of Goldie Hawn, she must have always seen herself as a future starlet, which is why her Oscar-nominated performance in Almost Famous seemed a wonderful hint of things to come. In his review, Roger Ebert famously spent an entire paragraph gushing about how brilliant she was in the Humble Pie scene. And then it all imploded.
After The Four Feathers and How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, one of which tried, one of which was vaguely watchable, Kate Hudson opened a horrifying bag of mediocre, community college garbage culminating in the putrescent-ly abysmal quadrilateral Bride Wars, My Best Friend's Girl, Fool's Gold and that one about Dupree. In the ten years since Penny Lane, she's gone from a rising star to the embodiment of lowest common denominator bullshit. Sure, Julia Roberts did the whole My Best Friend's Wedding thing now and again, but that was between the Erin Brokovich's. But alas, 2010 brings the release of the upcoming Killer Inside Me, her first real effort in eight years. It may well usher in her first positive reviews in a decade, then again, it may be the start of a long, painful trek into 3A.M. IFC re-runs. But hey, at least most of those try harder than Raising Helen.
Average Rotten Tomatoes Score Without Almost Famous: 33%
