4

Face Off -- John Travolta And Nicolas Cage

In Face Off, John Travolta plays FBI Agent Sean Archer and Nicholas Cage plays terrorist Castor Troy, and that's about as far as we get plot-wise before it descends into madness. This madness is kicked off because both men have their faces swapped onto each other's bodies. This results in Travolta playing the bad guy stuck in the good guy's body, and Cage playing the good guy stuck in the bad guy's body.

It goes about as well as that explanation does, and leads to unending cringe as you see actors visibly losing it on screen while trying to figure out what character they're supposed to portray. And rightfully so, because this casting is ass-backward. It should be ass-forward, which I swear would be better than it sounds.

How The Switch Would Fix It:

Let's start by making Travolta the initial villain (Troy), because remember, he's the villain for only about 10 percent of the movie, while in the remaining 90 percent he has to be the good guy while pretending to be the bad guy. That's John Travolta's specialty. He's great at portraying guys who are good-esque. Through classic roles like Danny Zuko in Grease, Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, and In Need Of A Paycheck John Travolta in Wild Hogs, Travolta has shown us that there's no one better at being a dude whom we're apparently supposed to like.

And with Cage, make him the FBI agent in the first 10 percent of the movie, before letting him off the leash to Cage it up for the last 90 percent. Cage isn't bad as a hero, but no matter how great he's being, I'd still have some questions for him before I let him carry me out of a burning building. Like, "You started this fire because you're crazy, right?" However, he's the king at pulling off full-blown insane expressions, wild proclamations, and terrifyingly broad emotional beats. His role as a terrorist pretending to be an FBI agent would elevate Face Off from its status as a cult '90s movie to a movie that you're required to watch every morning because its as important to your human survival as vitamins or oxygen. This is the power and the glory of Cage.

3

Spider-Man 3 -- Topher Grace And Thomas Haden Church

After the wonderful Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2, everyone thoroughly expected the trilogy to cap off with an instant classic. Instead we got Spider-Man 3, which suffers much of everything. We have three villains vying for screen time in a movie that's built to handle about a third of that. Not only that, but none of the villains are really that memorable, especially not Venom (Topher Grace) or Sandman (Thomas Haden Church). I'm literally getting a headache from remembering this.

2

Terminator Salvation -- Christian Bale And Sam Worthington

I like to pretend that his movie doesn't exist sometimes. "There can't be a movie more heartless about robots than this," I thought after watching 2007's Transformers. There was seemingly no way to make a movie about robots that got both robots and humans so desperately, tragically wrong. But destiny likes to hear you declare things like that and then release Terminator: Salvation, a movie that picks up the immense legacy of the Terminator franchise and tosses it screaming off a bridge.

In particular, I have a bone to pick with Christian Bale as John Conner. His performance is a Frankenstein monster of every recycled action movie trope that's been invented in the last four decades, and it's such a letdown to see Bale reduced to Diet John Wayne. As for Sam Worthington, who plays the Terminator/human hybrid Marcus Wright, I was actually okay with his performance, but it felt amazingly limited, as if someone was shouting "STOP IT, SAM" offscreen every time he tried to show emotion.

How The Switch Would Fix It:

Bale was not made for this role, and I don't care how in-demand of an action star he was at the time. What made his performance in the Dark Knight films so great was that he mixed intense pathos with the requisite criminal punching. That means that rather than playing the "GO! GO! GO!" John Conner, he'd be much better off crushing it as Marcus Wright. He's a thoughtful action star who would give the role some much-needed depth. He's a human coming to terms with the fact that he's actually a Terminator Man. This would cause anyone to break out the diary and start toying with some intense poetry. And there is no one better than Bale at poetic punching.

1

Batman Forever -- Tommy Lee Jones And Jim Carrey

When Michael Keaton says no to your movie but yes to Jack Frost, in which he plays a dad who gets turned into a talking snowman, you know that your movie has some problems. And the movie that we're currently talking about is Batman Forever, which works poorly as a Batman film, but really well as a way to tell your kids that you want them out of your life without actually having to say the words.

Personally, I blame a lot of Forever's failure on Tommy Lee Jones' bizarre performance as Two-Face and Jim Carrey's turn as the Riddler. To say that these roles lack subtlety is like saying that a dog turd might not make for a good Christmas present. Every line is shouted as loudly as possible, as if Carrey and Jones are trying to alert authorities that they've been trapped in some madman's Batman set dungeon. And what's worse, the lines are being shouted by the wrong people.

How The Switch Would Fix It:

Jones only played Two-Face because it was his son's favorite character, and that fact is blatantly obvious when you watch his performance. There is no depth to the Two-Face in Batman Forever. He's simply there to play with his coin and flip between two different voices. On the other hand, the Riddler is a role that he could actually sink his teeth into. The Riddler is a man that believes himself to be smarter than everyone in the world, but is crippled by the fact that he can't get on with a plan without first hinting to Batman about how he could be caught. Now picture that kind of personality, but dripping with Jones' sense of menace, and add in a dash of his Southern colloquialisms. Also, when you picture this, I prefer that you do so without the skintight green jumpsuit. It really, really, really helps.

As for Carrey, he's a master at the manic performance that Two-Face would require. Carrey is not that bad of a dramatic actor either, so it's not like he couldn't pull off all of the tragic gravitas that comes when Gotham's beloved DA Harvey Dent is hideously and irrevocably scarred. Switching between two personalities on a dime (pun intended) is Carrey's thing, and no one does it better. Not to mention he's much closer to the age of the Val Kilmer, who played Batman in Forever. Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent being friends and being around the same age helps add to the immense loss that occurs when Harvey turns evil, as seen in The Dark Knight.

I can't imagine Jones being friends with anyone, much less Kilmer's Bruce Wayne. To make Dent a sympathetic character, you need to cast an actor whom you can at least pretend people would want to hang out with. Jim Carrey's Harvey Dent could be that, while it's hard to imagine that Tommy Lee Jones has more daily personal contact than yelling at teenagers to stop riding their scooters so close to his garden.

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