3. Scarlett Johansson The Island
Geeks are a proud sort and if there's anything which represents anathema to them, it's Michael Bay. He's not as bad as people think, but the Transformers franchise has bestowed upon him the wrath of general geekdom like nothing else. To some, he's basically Satan a man who will milk the beloved franchises of your childhood to death, drowning them in a mix of lowest-common-denominator jokes and banality. Hell, even before he got hold of the robots in disguise, his name was still something of a dirty word in Hollywood circles, and actors in his films tended to suffer as a result. So to that end, here's The Island and Scarlett Johansson. The Island isn't necessarily an awful film, but it's most certainly a bad one, too clunky by half and full of actors that don't convince as action heroes. Much like Equilibrium, it appears to function as a pub quiz question for Sean Bean's ever-waning mortality. Yes, I know that the clone Ewan MacGregor and clone Scarlett Johansson were a different breed from the killing machine protagonists Bay had originally put on screen in films such as Bad Boys, but you can instantly tell whether actors are comfortable in action vehicles, and for my money, Johansson didn't convince. To be fair, it was a bit out of her comfort zone up until that point, she'd gone from child actress to teenage eye-candy, before graduating into waif-like characters on serious dramas. Taken at face value, this film could've driven a nail through her action movie ambitions before they even got off the ground. Hell, for all intents and purposes, it looked like it had, so it was hard to imagine that she could've rocked a skin-tight suit in Iron Man 2 (not in the physical way, but the acting way, you filthy perverts). Yet rock she did, all while looking perfectly at home in her fight scenes and proving that first impressions don't necessarily count. Perhaps we should all learn this for Ben Affleck. Just a thought, no?