10 Bad Films By Great Directors

Never has a director been less-suited to big-budget action than Roman Polanski, the inimitable director behind masterpieces like Knife in the Water and Chinatown. But, eight years after his last film, Tess, the divisive, diminutive Polanski was probably happy for the work, and so he took to the high-seas with Pirates, one of the most ill-conceived films of all time.

Written 12 years earlier, Polanski had fallen out of love with the project, something evident in the end result, which amounts to a frankly laughable film bereft of anything even close to approaching passion. Walter Matthau gives it a good go as Captain Red, but his heart is similarly nowhere near the picture, and you get the impression that he was after something a little lighter.

Humour is what the film lacks, though, and had Polanski realised that the notion of pirates themselves is pretty absurd, he might've come away with something campy and weird, a kind-of so-bad-it's-good deal. Instead Pirates is just plain bad, and the genre itself was not seen again until the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise reared it's ugly head over a decade later. Polanski would recover, firstly with a trio of enjoyable thrillers and then with his harrowing, Oscar-winning The Pianist, but the failure of Pirates would mean he'd never touch big-budget action again.