5 Movies with Horrible Dialogue

credit: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Why bad dialogue happens is hard to say, especially since it can derail a movie just as easily as poor special effects or anything else. Horrible dialogue, on the other hand, is usually so bad that people just let it go in favor of seeing what can possibly redeem a movie, and this is sometimes how blockbusters are made, if you can believe that. Why bad dialogue gets allowed is anyone’s guess, but there are those times when it feels as though the right actor might be able to power through it, improvise, and find a way that it can work despite the horrible sounding back and forth conversations that are written up now and then. The funny thing is that not even some of the greatest actors can take bad dialogue and spin Oscar gold out of it. Even the best actors can only do so much before they have to start thinking ‘rewrite’, which is another common practice in Hollywood that can help or harm depending on what’s taken away and what’s kept around. 

Here are five movies in which the dialogue was simply horrible. 

5. Twilight

Oh…dear…lord. Only those that are beyond emotional and teenagers (I know, it’s redundant) would think the dialogue in these movies was any good since the teenage angst that’s being performed by those who are fully-grown adults in this movie is simply cringe-worthy, no matter that it became a hit. It’s not quite as hard as people might think to cater to angsty teens that want a story that deals with unrequited love and dealing with wanting what we can’t have. But nearly every other line being whispered, the constant turning around of the actors as they spoke, and the soap opera feeling of this movie was more than enough to keep a lot of people away unless they were teenage girls or bored house moms. Yes, I said that. 

4. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

This is tough to say since, like a lot of people, I’m a big Star Wars nerd that loves the story, the characters, and all of it to be fair. But something about Hayden Christiansen’s acting just didn’t mesh throughout the two movies he took on the role of Anakin Skywalker. Even Jake Lloyd wasn’t all that great, but there are a lot of people willing to give him a pass since he was a kid. Hayden had been acting before this movie, at least a little, and was thrust into a role that he can’t be separated from now, which means the bad acting is there to stay. But at least he had several great actors around him to help out. 

3. Fifty Shades of Grey

Here’s another movie that didn’t have to be rock solid on the dialogue since people were way too into the content to care. The sex games, the domination, and the humiliation that women don’t want to take outside of the bedroom are enough to turn heads at some points, but overall this is a BDSM movie that got away with its rating since it had plenty of other content that people tended to bypass more often than not to see what all the fuss was about. Does anyone remember how much of a stir the book series created before it ever hit the big screen? One would have thought that someone had written literal word porn. Well, they kind of did, right? 

2. Hideout

credit: Hideout

While looking through the lists of movies that could have rounded out this list, there were a lot of candidates that could have taken the top spots. But this is one of those that a person can’t help but find enticing enough to watch but a little too tempting to roast when all is said and done. Some might state that it’s not polite to dig into a movie that didn’t bother to become much and is essentially the product of a cast that had about as much chemistry between them as a bag of bricks. But the dialogue in this movie is so horrible that one can’t help but think that if it were any worse that it might have just as well been written on a napkin from a greasy spoon diner. 

1. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

It’s kind of tough to say this about a movie that starred this many talented stars since their chemistry should have been on point and, without a doubt, capable of knocking this movie out of the park. But somehow, somewhere in between the legends that were being rolled out for the audience to ooh and aah at, the dialogue kind of fell through the cracks, and even the late great Sean Connery couldn’t bring it back into line. The idea of this movie was a lot of fun, but somehow it just fell flatter than a pancake beneath a steamroller. 

What’s really frustrating is that a lot of scripts are read through before they go to film.