Antonio Banderas: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

2. Emir Nesib - Day Of The Falcon (2013)

To say Banderas hasn't done his best work for a while now is something of an understatement: as a case in point, is an epic that aspires to be a new Lawrence Of Arabia but which fundamentally fudges everything as simple as being entertaining.

The fact that a Spaniard and an Englishman (Mark Strong) play Arabs is far from the film's biggest issue, but it does say something about how broken the general approach to the story was from the get-go. Like, seriously - why not just cast actors who are actually the right race?

For some reason renamed from its far superior title Black Gold (perhaps to sound more adventurous), ...Falcon's scope and ambition just isn't matched by its entertainment factor and it limps along at a painfully tedious pace. Fatally, Banderas seems too interested in dialling up the ham in his performance, and you end up worrying that the Qatar government might have been exceptionally pissed off that this was the film they chose to announce themselves as a legitimate film-making country.