Cate Blanchett: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

By Tom Baker /

And 5 That Sucked...

5. Kate Wheeler €“ Bandits (2001)

Blanchett actually earned Best Actress nominations at the Golden Globes Screen Actors Guild Awards for her supporting role in this Barry Levinson-directed crime caper, but that seems more in spite of the film than because of it. Being a woman of discerning tastes (and genuine talents), Cate Blanchett hasn't appeared in a whole lot of films you could categorise as uniformly bad. But when you stumble across a thoroughly average movie in her otherwise glittering filmography, it stands out like a sore thumb. And that's exactly what this clumsy crime-rom-com thing is. Bandits is by no means a bad film, but the amount of talent involved should really have come up with something better. Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton take the lead as a couple of hapless bank robbers known as the €œSleepover Bandits€ because they kidnap the manager of a target bank the night before a planned robbery. Then Blanchett's bored housewife, literally running away from her marriage, bumps into them and a weird love triangle between her and the two convicts begins. That's a lot of set up, but without much pay off, the film never quite deciding on its tone and collapsing into a needlessly convoluted ending. Levinson not deciding on what film he was making means the actors can only do so much.