6. Russell Crowe - Les Miserables
When I went to the cinema to check out Tom Hooper's long-awaited adaptation of
Les Miserables (for, uh, "research purposes"), I was genuinely nervous to see what was going to happen when Russell Crowe opened his mouth and tried to be the movie's primary antagonist, the cold and God-fearing Inspector Javert. If you've ever seen the musical on stage or read the book, you'll know that Crowe is perfectly believable as Javert, at least aesthetically, anyway. It was the singing I was worried about. And you know what happened when Crowe appeared and belted out his first line? Everybody laughed. Everybody in the cinema laughed out loud, as if Crowe had been partaking in a skit on
Saturday Night Live or something. "No," I felt like saying. "He's not joking around... don't you know he's being serious here?" Alas, cast in the musical version of
Les Miserables, Crowe looks lost admist his cast-mates. It would have eased my pain to take him by the hand at the interval and drive him home - unfortunately, this being cinema, there was no interval.