Bill Murray: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

5 That Sucked

5. Mayor Cole - City Of Ember (2008)

City Of Ember always felt like someone was trying to make a Guillermo Del Toro movie for kids, but had only ever seen images and a colour palette and didn't really understand the Mexican auteur beyond that. It was a dystopian portrait of an underground world characterised by classification and corporate greed: managing to be both anti-communist and anti-capitalist at the same time in a rare achievement. For all of those interesting points, it was also as bland as tap water. It's well crafted, but it just feels like a retread - albeit a pretty one - and the moralising is as annoying as it is confused. Murray plays the villain of the piece: a pantomimey power-crazed supreme leader who hoards canned food and makes sure everyone is in their place. He seems to have risen to power based on charisma alone, but rather oddly this is a performance lacking in that usually abundant Murray raw material. He's an idiot, and this is just too far into the unlikeable territory to really convince of why he'd ever make it to the Mayor's office, largely because Murray never really feels all that interested.