10 Actors That Tried Being Action Heroes And Failed Miserably

8. John Cusack

Mark wahlberg Max Payne
Universal Studios Home Entertainment

The former darling of slacker cinema, John Cusack's star has been in decline for a while now, and based on the overall quality of his straight-to-video action output over the last few years there's a sneaking suspicion that he might be signing on to projects that even the similarly-slumming Nicolas Cage and Bruce Willis are turning down.

Cusack hasn't had a box office hit for a very long time, and his mid-career decision to embrace the idea of becoming a late-blooming action star has only seen him fade even further into irrelevance after he's largely spent the last half a decade showing up in bargain basement genre flicks with titles like Drive Hard, Reclaim, Cell, Arsenal and Distorted, all of which seem to hail directly from VOD's random name generator.

He seems to have made his peace with it, and even showed up alongside fellow fallen stars Cage and Willis in The Prince and Blood Money respectively, but unlike those two Cusack doesn't have an extensive back catalogue full of action classics to fall back on.

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