Bryan Cranston: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

2. James Pettis - Love Ranch (2010)

A second film in which prostitutes play a big part, Love Ranch is based on the lives of Joe and Sally Conforte, a married couple who opened the first legal brothel in the United States, whose relationship was marked by violence when infidelity threatened to tear them apart. But even with an exceptional cast - including the return of Joe Pesci, with a ludicrous wig - Cranston and Helen Mirren, the raunchy film lacks staying power, and the acting almost universally across the board feels more like an exploitation flick than a genuine mainstream movie. Cranston, like the rest of the cast, is hampered by the fact that the story almost certainly belongs more on the small screen - on the Hallmark Channel, or perhaps swallowed up within a cheesy day time soap, more fittingly - and the uneven tone that seems to think it's Boogie Nights, when those aspirations have no place or basis in reality. The actor is basically swallowed up as Pesci and Mirren own what it is possible to own on screen, and it's by association with this over-shot slop that Cranston suffers most.