10 Terrible Movies That Wasted Amazing Casts

The literary world has proved rich pickings for filmmakers over the years, but the results can often be a bit random. In recent years alone, we’ve seen many examples of both the good (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, No Country for Old Men) and the not so good (The Great Gatsby, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) – and writer David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, adapted for the big screen by Tom Tykwer and The Wachowskis, wasn’t immune to the curse.

Despite amassing an accomplished cast including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Susan Sarandon and Jim Broadbent and cleverly playing on the original book’s themes of reincarnation by featuring its actors in several roles across the film’s six-part, multigenerational story, Cloud Atlas didn’t transfer to celluloid all that well.

Though the film did receive swathes of praise, it also had its fair share of detractors too who called out its convoluted plot and its multiple-role casting approach resulting in actors appearing in some rather culturally insensitive get-ups, including Hugo Weaving and Jim Sturgess in ‘yellowface’ make-up and Halle Berry playing both an Indian woman and a white Jewish woman.

Granted, it wouldn’t have been an easy task for any film crew to bring Mitchell’s sprawling, complicated novel to the screen, but the writer himself has said he thought the book ‘unfilmable’ and there may be more than just a grain of truth to that.