4. Dan Dark - The Singing Detective (2003)
Oh, man. This movie has its fans, I know, but I found it to be relatively intolerable from start to finish - I guess I understand what it was going for, but it just doesn't work. The story concerns a detective novelist called Dan Dark, played by Robert Downey Jr., who is confined to a hospital bed with a terrible skin disease - in horrific pain, he eventually divulges into a series of fantasies that unravel at the same time. We have the "pleasure" of watching them unfold. One might say that Downey Jr. is making a noticeable effort here, but for me the performance simply doesn't gel - and that perhaps comes as a result of the actor simply trying too hard to make it work, and it clashes with the picture in general. It's kind of awkward to watch him miming through a bunch of scenes, too, and the character is generally unlikeable. Putting Downey Jr.'s performance on this list in the "sucked" section is, at least, sure to prove polarising... personally, I see a great actor stretching for the sake of it.