Bryce Dallas Howard: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

2. Terminator Salvation (2008)

Coming at a time when Howard was stuck in a rut artistically, yet raking in the cash from a number of supporting roles in summer blockbusters, Terminator Salvation represents another lull in her career critically. Whether this is truly down to bad acting is unlikely; there's nothing wrong with Howard in this role, it's just difficult to remember her 15 minutes after the credits stop. Playing Kate Conner, a physician interviewing doctors in order to maintain the human race's knowledge of medical science after the apocalypse, Howard is overwhelmed by a film which is essentially a two hour action sequence. At no point during this film does Howard become a joke, and in none of her action films so far could be levelled at her that she plays her characters as helpless wimps. It's just the action-scripts she was receiving around this time didn't seem to give her a lot to work with. To make things worse here, she's heavily pregnant, which hardly helps. In her defence, it was her idea to give her character the role of medical researcher. If she hadn't done that, you probably wouldn't be able to recall her performance at all. What on earth would her character have been doing otherwise?