Jack Black: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

4. Dan Landsman - The D Train (2015)

In the post-Bernie section of Black's career, it's a shame to see him still banging a similar drum to some of his poorest comedic outings. The biggest problem for The D Train - and those other similar films - is that somewhere along the line they misinterpreted Black's anti-hero charisma in Tenacious D and High Fidelity and Orange County, and ran it too close to genuine dislike. So instead of having a character like Shallow Hal who is broken but entirely likeable and who you can root for without question, you end up with a succession of questionable lead characters who it's hard to believe could ever form any real relationships. There's no evaluation of why they're like they are: it's just, painfully, because they're played by Jack Black, apparently. That much is true of Dan Landsman - a name so consciously "pleb-like" that he might as well have been called Peter Boring - a pathologically unlikeable man who does pathologically unlikeable things to be considered vaguely cool, a couple of decades out of high school. There was some opportunity to be daring, or as character driven as Bernie, but it fails on both accounts, and Black just ends up feeling like a mistake in his own movie.