Liev Schreiber: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

4. Ned - Every Day

This overwrought, cliche-addled drama does nothing but bores for the sum of its parts, relying on the same narrative staples that we've come to know in great detail over the years in soap operas and poorly written TV shows - so it's Schreiber's TV writer father, Ned, who misses his son's violin recital at the beginning because he's too busy, ahem, "performing" elsewhere, and what follows is 90 minutes of stuff we've seen before, delivered in a way that is never original, never particularly dramatic, and absolutely never entertaining. Schreiber doesn't help matters. Why, you wonder? Plainly put, his angsty Ned is just stiff as a board from start to finish - far too serious and way too uninteresting to be the main character in a dramatic movie, whether it was intentional or not. What fun is it watching a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders unless he eventually breaks free and learns to loosen up, after all? Dramatically speaking, Schreiber's performance is okay (the acting isn't "bad," per se), but there's certainly a sense that the movie might've been far improved without him cast in the lead... which kind of says it all.