10 Terrible Movies That Wasted Amazing Casts

A film boasting an ensemble cast featuring the likes of Michael Fassbender and Javier Bardem, the writing talents of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy and the directorial experience of Ridley Scott couldn’t be anything but good, right? In the case of 2013 crime thriller The Counsellor, that would be a resounding ‘no’.

Despite McCarthy’s works often making for some brilliant film adaptations – see well-received post-apocalyptic drama The Road and the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-winning interpretation of No Country for Old Men for proof – The Counsellor was his first feature length screenplay to make it to the big screen, and it’s safe to say that, talented as he is, perhaps his efforts are best kept within the pages of his books.

With its dialogue-heavy and schlocky script, film critic Mark Kermode best summed The Counsellor when he described it as a film that ‘gets an A-list cast to recite B-movie dialogue with C-minus results’. And sadly for that A-list cast, it’s a film that’s more memorable for their violent, racy scenes – including a decapitated Brad Pitt and a flashback in which Cameron Diaz bizarrely but agilely pleasures herself using the windscreen of Bardem’s Ferrari – than their actual acting talents.