Finding that right actor for action film fame is a tricky business. Bruce Willis found popularity with the Die Hard franchise but then there was Hudson Hawk. Keanu Reeves struck gold with Speed but it was years before John Wick catapulted him back up the charts. Can you imagine how surprised Liam Neeson was when the Taken movies blew up at the box office? But my favorite is when Hollywood tries to turn some sports star, model, B-actor or felon into an action hero, thereby providing some of the most enjoyable bad movies ever. So, kick back, crack open a beer and slam in a DVD of my personal best Hall of Shamers:
Jay Leno– Collision Course (1989). The Tonight Show host plays a sports car-driving Detroit cop who teams up with a detective from Tokyo (Pat Morita) to find out who stole a top-secret prototype for a super-turbo engine. The two start out sparring- “I ought to stir-fry your face!” Leno screams- but eventually come to respect each other. “You have big sense of humor,” Morita admits. After thousands of Godzilla, sushi and karate jokes, as well as countless tedious car chases, “Sayonara” doesn’t come soon enough.
Shaquille O’Neal– Steel (1997). As if it wasn’t painful enough watching him play a genie in Kazaam, things got worse in the leaden Steel. Based on a D.C. comic, Shaq plays a military metallurgist (!) who, along with his wheel-chair bound scientist friend, is transformed into a chrome-plated crime-fighting machine. Unfortunately, O’Neal’s action scenes primarily consist of him walking around with a big hammer, which only makes him look like Robodope. The funniest moments occur every time the 7’ 1’’ O’Neal stands up and shoots right out of the film’s frame. He’s a cameraman’s (and audience’s) worst nightmare.
Pamela Anderson– Barb Wire (1996). A laughable futuristic sci-fi flick, loosely based on Casablanca, of all things. Lee plays a bodacious bounty hunter who runs a wild bar called Hammerhead. The “plot” concerns stolen contact lenses, but it’s merely an excuse to let Ms. Anderson slip in and out of revealing outfits and kick some ass. As for her acting ability, she was more believable giving head to Tommy Lee in that notorious home video.
Bill Cosby– Leonard Part 6 (1987). Cosby plays a secret-agent-turned-restauranteur who’s forced out of retirement when other agents start getting bumped off by frogs, cats, squirrels and rainbow trout. He tangles with the evil Medusa (Gloria Foster), fights off attacking lobsters with melted butter, rides an ostrich and battles killer vegetarians by throwing beef at them and kickboxing while wearing pink ballet slippers. Even Cosby begged his fans not to see this one. Perhaps the movie could be used at a later court appearance for Mr. Cosby to prove “diminished capacity.”
Cindy Crawford– Fair Game (1995). The supermodel made her less-than-super debut in Fair Game, playing a lawyer targeted by former KGB agents. William Baldwin is a cop who tries to keep her alive. (He bares his butt when he and Crawford make love in a freight train.) Crawford, who is so natural and lovely in interviews, is hilariously wooden onscreen- though she shows great flair when showering, screaming or emerging from the water in a wet T-shirt.
The Barbarian Brothers– Double Trouble (1992). Musclehead twins Peter and David Paul got their start playing glandular gladiators in the cheesy sword-and-sandal epic The Barbarians (1987). But their finest achievement (other than when Woody Harrelson attacked them with a chainsaw in the director’s cut of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers) is Double Trouble. David plays a cop and Peter a cat burglar: the two are forced to become partners in order to bring down a smuggling ring led by Roddy McDowall. With bad shag hairdos and too-tight clothes, they fight off the bad guys and have goofy exchanges like, “No way!” “Yes way!” Billy “Lost In Space” Mumy even has a cameo as a hit man.
Tonya Harding– Breakaway (1995). Way before she made her career rehabilitation tour with the release of I, Tonya, Ms. Harding made this direct-to-video bomb. The notorious Olympic skater plays the girlfriend of a guy who likes to make explosives for gangsters. When she accidentally intercepts a paper bag stuffed with mob money, she grabs it and flees to the Caribbean to sip pina coladas and live happily after, proving, once again, crime does pay.
Tatum O’Neal & Irene Cara– Certain Fury (1985). Tatum & Irene play strangers brought together during a violent (and ludicrous) shootout in a courtroom at the beginning of the film. They go on the run, pursued by cops who mistakenly think they started the melee. Tatum plays Scarlett, a tough cookie who can’t read, and Irene plays Tracy, the rebellious daughter of a well-respected surgeon. The “Defiant Ones” escape through rat-infested sewers, fight off a sleazy pornographer named Sniffer (Nicholas Campbell) and hide out in a cavernous drug den avoiding the goons sent by a criminal named Rodney (Peter Fonda), who lives on a boat. O’Neal is laughably unrealistic as the hard-boiled prostitute, but that’s half the fun of this furiously funny action misfire directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal (father of Jake and Maggie). I saw this on 42nd Street when it opened in 1985, and had tears streaming down my cheeks I was laughing so hard.
But my absolute favorite Godawful action star has to be Anna Nicole Smith. The bodacious, bovine former Playboy centerfold and Guess Jeans model whose life was a tragic tabloid hayride made two staggeringly ludicrous action films, directed by her Svengali, Raymond Martino. Not since Chesty Morgan exploded on screen in Deadly Weapons has there been a star so scarily endowed and so astonishingly untalented.
To The Limit (1995). A white-haired Joey Travolta stars as Frank DaVinci, whose wedding ends in a hail of bullets, leaving his new bride dead and him clinging to life in the hospital. Across town, his associate China (Michael Nouri), is impatiently waiting for his girlfriend, Colette (Smith), who is writhing around in a bathtub, playing with a bar of soap and moaning in ecstasy. After China is blown up in his car, Colette goes undercover in a black wig that makes her look like actress Louise Brooks after eating too many pies. Mob boss Philly Bambino (!) moves Frank to Las Vegas after he is almost assassinated in the hospital by an evil nurse wielding a hypodermic full of what appears to be Palmolive. Colette contacts Frank, and tells him that she is a CIA-operative and that her boss, a crazed ex-Vietnam vet named Arthur Jameson (Jack Bannon), is the guy trying to kill him because of a computer disc that implicates his as an illegal trader during the war. Jameson is a real sicko- bald and tattooed, he likes girls to drip hot wax over him and whip him mercilessly while a fake Doors riff beats in the background. Is Colette telling the truth? Is she a “good witch” or a “bad witch””? Who cares. She takes a shower and shoots several men while wearing only a sweater, and the action moves to Hoover Dam for the fiery finale. “My name isn’t Colette,” she admits at the end. “It’s Vickie Lynn” (her own real name). Anna Nicole doesn’t just phone in a performance, she faxes it. With her lipsticked mouth curved downward in a perpetual pout, she is fine with simple declarative sentences, but when she has to show emotion, particularly anger, that flat, nasal Texas twang does her in. And it doesn’t look like there’s a Quentin Tarantino in Joey Travolta’s future either.
Skyscraper (1995). A Die Hard rip-off, with Anna Nicole playing a feisty helicopter pilot named Carrie Wink (with amazingly long, lacquered red nails) who is forced to fight Eurotrash terrorists (who all look like they escaped the cover of a romance novel) in an L.A. high rise. The lead bad guy is a French Arab who peppers his speech with Shakespeare quotes. Anna Nicole is particularly zombified in this one- she delivers each line in a Prozac haze, lumbering around the building in a jumpsuit unzipped to show her ample cleavage. Her cop boyfriend (Richard Steinmetz) races to her rescue with his jeans inexplicably ripped wide open at the crotch. At the end, when he and a bloodied Anna Nicole stumble out of the building his pants are magically sewn shut. Our Anna Nicole does have an obligatory shower scene and, in the middle of the action, she stops to dreamily recall having sex at a picnic. Skyscraper is my personal favorite of her “action” films: it’s really stupid, and she’s particularly trashy and preposterous in it. Every line of dialogue she delivers is flat and emotionless; her every gaze into the camera is zonked out and pitiful. She looks at the screen in bewilderment as if to ask, “Can I go home now?”
Who’s next? What about an action movie starring TVs cooking show host Rachael Ray? You can just hear the promo: “She’s out of the kitchen and cooking with gas. Don’t give her no sass or she’ll kick your ass!”