Buy Or Don’t Buy

Like many fanboys, I saw Watchmen last night. (SPOILER WARNING: I liked it.) I’ve read and understand a lot of the criticisms or it, but I pretty much expected the omnipresent slo-mo, and I actually enjoyed Zach Snyder’s musical shorthand (”The Times They Are A-Changing,” “Hello Darkness My Old Friend” and “Hallelujah” ) as a thread to connect the fictional history to our own.

But the performances! Jackie Earl Haley and Jeffrey Dean Morgan are great, Carla Gugino and Patrick Wilson are solidly respectable and Billy Crudup does the most he can with limited face time. What threatens to sink the movie though, are Matthew Goode and Malin Akerman.

Rarely in a feature studio film do you see genuinely horrible performances. There’s too much money at stake. Scenes can be cut, moments can be edited around, lines can be redubbed until the actors are merely mediocre. But Goode and Akerman (and Snyder, too) prove that, even in a movie with a $100 million budget, you can still be straight-up bad.

When I first heard that Matthew Goode would be playing Ozymandias, I was actually pretty pleased. I had only ever seen him in Match Point, but in that he had the snotty know-it-all rich kid thing down. Other then that I saw him in the trailer for Brdiehead Revisited, and I had read a story somewhere about how he was actually kind of poor, so he seemed cultured and interesting enough to play the smartest man in the world.

I was wrong. In the film, Goode is saddled with an atrotious hairstlye and purple-heavy wardrobe that make him impossible to take seriously. Even worse is his voice. Goode is British, and a British accent would have worked fine with the character, but Snyder has him speak in a mincing American accent that’s wholly unconvincing. Goode spends the entire film looking uncomfortable with the words that are coming out his mouth.

But Goode’s badness pales in comparison to that of Malin Akerman. In all fairness, Laurie Juspeczyk is not an easy part to cast. She has to carry the hardest emotional beats of the story while being believable both as a world-weary 30-something and an 18 year-old who sparks instant desire in everyone she meets. Akerman is not the actress to try. In everything I’ve seen her in she has been flat and uninteresting, only notable for her willingness to do nude scenes. I was genuinely disappointed when I heard she was going to play Silk Sprectre; to cast Malin Akerman in Watchmen is to admit that you really only want someone who looks good in spandex.

And that’s exactly what happens. Akerman shows up, looks lost and stops the film in its tracks. On the plus side, she’s given film reviewers the chance to whip out some enjoyable barbs. From The New Republic, here’s Chris Orr:

[...] Malin Akerman wrestles with the concept of character like a bunny with an anaconda [...]

And here’s The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane:

[...] Malin Akerman, whose line readings suggest that she is slightly defeated by the pressure of pretending to be one person, let alone two.

And finally, Tasha Robinson from The AV Club’s chat:

She’s just bad. I don’t think that she can bring across the depth of emotion required in any scene requiring emotion.

It’s so fun, try out your own in the comments!