15 Truly Terrible Villainous Performances From Awesome Actors
8. Mickey Rourke - Stormbreaker
Mickey Rourke has had a strange and uneven career. He doesn't do that many films but he is a tremendous actor, as shown by his work in The Wrestler and Sin City. He is also someone capable of elevating bad material (Iron Man 2 and The Expendables) but he didn't do that here.
Stormbreaker was a complete disaster. It was another failed attempts to launch a Harry Potter-style franchise but ended up being a box office bomb, so understandably the planned franchise never happened.
It's not good. It's curiously bland for a film that's meant to echo James Bond and lacks enough charm to work. Mickey Rourke seems to have been aware the film was doomed and sleepwalks through the film. He's a rather silly protagonist, so it should've been a far hammier and more fun performance, but Rourke is too serious and bored for the character to work.
Sure, this is a guy who wants to murder every schoolchild in Britain in order to get revenge on the Prime Minister, who bullied him when they at school, but the guy who delivered a powerful monologue about war in The Expendanbles is definitely capable of more than this.