10 Worst Performances In Otherwise Awesome 2016 Movies

It’s not necessarily the case that Mark Wahlberg can’t act. He was brilliant in his breakout role as naïve porn star Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights, he shone as a nihilistic firefighter in existential comedy I Heart Huckabees and was excellent as a cynical sergeant in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed.

But for every great performance and film, there’s a handful of stinkers and shoddy acting that scream otherwise. Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes reboot or Rock Star, for example, or – god forbid – the atrocity that was M. Night Shyamalan’s eco-horror mishap The Happening. The less said about his ‘rap career’ as the frontman of Mark Mark and the Funky Bunch the better, too.

His performance in disaster biopic Deepwater Horizon isn’t The Happening level bad, but it certainly isn’t a great one. He stars as real-life survivor Mike Williams, an engineer on the titular ill-fated oil rig. It seems director Peter Berg was going for the ‘sympathetic hero of the story’ bent with Wahlberg’s character but unfortunately, in the hands of Wahlberg he comes across as smarmy and flat rather than anything resembling heroic.

His accent is pretty inconsistent too, wavering from the regular Bostonian brogue we associate with him to a dodgy interpretation of his character’s Southern patois. Bit of a slap in the face to the real-life Mike Williams, if you ask me.