10 Risky Movie Moments That Totally Failed

10. Robert De Niro's Geriatric Fight Moves - The Irishman

Martin Scorsese's The Irishman ranks among the director's boldest and most ambitious projects, if only because he used comprehensive digital de-aging effects to have Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci portray the crime drama's central characters at numerous stages of their lives, often many decades apart.

For the most part, the effect is incredibly impressive and largely vaults over the uncanny valley, though there's one infamous, meme-worthy scene which painfully underlines the limitations of digital de-aging.

Beyond using CGI to make his actors appear younger, Scorsese bafflingly refused to use stand-ins for any scenes commanding a greater sense of physicality from the cast. 

And so, for the sequence where a middle-aged version of De Niro's protagonist Frank Sheeran beats up a grocery store owner, it's painfully obvious we're watching a 70-something De Niro make a rather unconvincing, stiff-bodied attempt at pretending to assault someone.

No matter how persuasively someone's face can be de-aged by CGI, it can't disguise how age affects an actor's body, gait, and how they generally carry themselves. 

And so, by having De Niro act out the scene himself rather than pasting his face over a middle-aged body double, the scene was rendered a pure laughing stock.

Above all else, why not just shoot the scene in close-up from below, rather than blatantly exposing De Niro's frailty in a flat wide?