7. Christian Bale Equilibrium
The only thing Equilibrium appears to be famous for these days is being another link in the chain of Sean Bean's phenomenal death record. While laudable in itself, I'm sure that's not what the film-makers had in mind for it when it was first released. Yet really, they shouldn't have been surprised Equilibrium was an odd fruit of a film, billed as a Matrix-killer but no way near as developed in realising its own dystopia, which eschewed intellectual undertones for the sake of grabbing a semi-interesting premise and using it as an excuse to shoot things. Unsurprisingly, the film bombed both critically and commercially, and it didn't help that Christian Bale was positively bore-inspiring in the main part. We all knew that now-adult Bale was capable of scenery-chewing awesomeness you need only to look at American Psycho, the film that established him as an adult actor, to see that he can be damned hilarious/emotional when he sets him mind to it. But here, constrained by the film's bonkers premise, he just seemed... off, and though the Gun Kata martial art was awesome in theory, it was so staged and weird-looking that it did Bale no favours in the action hero stakes. Let me explain an effective actioner requires your character to be slightly vulnerable, but when your hero has ostensibly god-like powers over all others, this vanishes pretty quickly. There's a reason why they had to make Neo fight hordes of Agent Smiths in the Matrix Reloaded, but Bale gets no similar leveller here, and he's left adrift in his own movie. Frankly, as befitting a film about a lack of emotions, he's just a bit dull. But did this stop him from killing it as Batman later down the line? You bet your caped-crusading arse it didn't. Given the right direction, actors can put most things behind them something Bale certainly showed.