Bill Murray: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

2. Happy Shannon - Passion Play (2011)

Never heard of it? There's a good reason for that. In 1993, Murray made Mad Dog & Glory, playing against type to commit one of the oddest, but not the least successful gangster performances imaginable. Frank Milo worked because he was a reasonable exaggeration of Murray's accepted persona, even if the threat of physical violence was a little hard to accept. Clearly buoyed by the experience, Murray went back to the gangster genre in 2011 to play Roy Orbison-alike Happy Shannon in a movie that attempted to pair Mickey Rourke and Megan Fox up as a believable couple. That wasn't its only fault of course - Rourke actually admitted it was "a terrible movie" if you need further endorsement - and you have to wonder first why Murray agreed to do it, and second why he didn't put as much effort into his performance as the make-up team did into his hairpiece. The film took its attempts to be cool rather than good way too seriously, and that seems to have infected Murray's piecemeal performance. It could have been great, and watching many people attempt to kill Rourke for seemingly very little reason should have been entertaining. As it is, it's just a perverse, sad footnote on Murray's recent career.