10 Worst Performances In Otherwise Awesome 2016 Movies

Sorry Mark Wahlberg, but Deepwater Horizon wasn’t the only film you lowered the tone of with your take on acting last year. Funnily enough, Patriots Day was too directed by Peter Berg. Perhaps Wahlberg and Berg, although they sound like a great high-end law firm, are just not that good a movie-making combination.

That’s not to say that Patriots Day was by any means an awful film. Critics, by and large, loved it and it currently holds a very respectable 78% on Rotten Tomatoes despite a few legitimate criticisms about it being a tad too soon to Hollywoodize the relatively tragedy that was the Boston Marathon bombings.

But then there’s Wahlberg’s performance as police sergeant Tommy Saunders. Like Deepwater Horizon, he’s the hero of the day but unlike that movie he’s not a real-life person but rather a composite made up of several actual police officers involved in the incident and subsequent investigation.

Perhaps this is part of the problem. Because his character has no grounding in real life, he’s written and performed as a stereotype – a hard-drinking, blue collar Bostonian cop so clichéd he constantly feels two steps away from suggesting we go ‘pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd’.

Also, because he’s technically a fusion of several people he’s stereotypically hamming it up almost everywhere. He’s there at the finish line heroically helping victims after the bombs have been detonated, he’s there during the shootout with the brothers behind the attacks, he’s there when the bombing suspect is finally apprehended hiding in a boat. All of which is technically impossible.

Worst of all, Wahlberg’s character isn’t even needed. His co-stars – including John Goodman as police commissioner Ed Davis and J.K. Simmons as police sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese – do a perfectly fine job of bringing their real-life counterparts to life but end up overshadowed by Wahlberg’s heavy-handed performance.