4. Jack Morrison - Ladder 49
It's hard to really understand why Phoenix even agreed to make this film in the first place. He had recently appeared in the hugely successful M. Night Shyamalan film Signs, so he couldn't have been desperate enough to be looking for more paycheck roles. Perhaps he genuinely saw something inspiring in the story about heroic Baltimore firefighters, a particularly hot subject in the post-9/11 climate in the United States. Again, it's not as though Ladder 49 is a particularly terrible film, and at no point does it feel as though Phoenix is phoning it in. But the material never provides Phoenix with enough depth or range to deliver anything but a typical, bland, cliched performance, and the film itself smooths too many edges and simplifies too many complex emotions to be taken seriously in any way, shape or form. Plus, it doesn't feature nearly enough hammy acting from John Travolta, who, like the rest of the movie, plays it too safe for anything interesting to come about from it.