6. Billy Connolly - The X-Files: I Want To Believe
Billy Connolly is one of the best stand-up comedians in the world, and a fine comic actor; incidentally, I'd recommend you rush out and see Dustin Hoffman's Quartet as soon as possible, where Billy's turn as a charming old rascal of an opera singer is one of the highlights of an excellent film. I'd also recommend you see Quartet before you rewatch The X-Files: I Want To Believe, because when you do rewatch the latter film, you will lose faith in the Big Yin. Nothing makes for a worse performance to watch than when a good actor attempts to invest a hokey premise with complete sincerity, and just calling this movie hokey is being generous to the level of sainthood. Connolly's character, Joseph Crissman, is a defrocked child-molesting priest with a penchant for weeping blood and having visions of all sorts of shenanigans involving corpses and that. And as chance would have it, his visions can help the FBI in their search for several FBI agents who have gone missing in the past several days (presumably, these people quit before production began and had to be found for the key explanatory scenes absent from the finished film, which is barely comprehensible as a result). This manhunt leads to the rather ridiculous sight of Billy Connolly jogging over ice sheets in front of herds of FBI Officers with dogs, with his bouncy hair making him look like an scared old lady running away from a mob. Watching the scene now, it looks to me like Connolly is directing the battle scene which concludes Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2, and is offering the crew his vision as to where Michael Sheen's head is going to end up after being yanked off: "IT'S HERE!" If only he could have made a joke or two about how ridiculous the whole situation was, The X-Files: I Want To Believe might have been bearable, but the actors were so entirely in earnest that the film never had a chance of being anything more than awful. And, as is so often the case with this list, the actor sucked because the movie sucked. Father, forgive Billy, for he knew not what he was doing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETC6PxDFTRQ