10 Actors That Tried Being Action Heroes And Failed Miserably
Everyone tries their hand at being an action hero eventually, these guys just couldn't cut it.
At some stage in every actor's career, they will eventually star in an action movie.
Whether they want to try their hand at leading a franchise, work is getting pretty thin on the ground or they simply can't resist the lure of the paycheck, it has almost become a rite of passage for any star worth their salt to try their hand at some running and gunning.
Signing on to an action flick is one thing, but finding success is the genre is an entirely different ballgame. There's a reason why Sylvester Stallone is still churning them out in his 70s, and most of it has to do with the fact that he has a proven track record of success. Liam Neeson also entered the fray pretty late on, but he ended up becoming the most bankable action star in the business for years based purely on his no-frills string of movies that delivered exactly what they promised.
Not everybody gets to be a Schwarzenegger, Cruise, Willis or Keanu, and there are more than a few actors over the years that fancied themselves as Hollywood's next big action hero and ended up falling flat on their faces.
10. Taylor Lautner
Incredibly, Taylor Lautner is still just 28 years old, so there's plenty of time to enter the next stage of his career, but at this stage it would be fair to say that he hasn't reached the same levels of success as The Twilight Saga's other two leads.
Following the conclusion of the multi-billion sparkly vampire franchise, both Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart aimed to reinvent themselves as acclaimed thespians in a string of independent dramas. Lautner on the other hand jumped headfirst into the action genre, and things didn't exactly go to plan.
Both Abduction and Tracers were about as banal and generic as their titles would suggest, scoring Rotten Tomatoes scores of 24% and 5% respectively, with neither exactly setting the box office alight. The leading man's painfully wooden performances didn't help either, and Lautner has only appeared in one movie in the last four years, one that was also panned by critics, leaving him at a career crossroads before he's even hit 30.