4

Sean Connery -- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

20th Century Fox

The Movie:

(Yes, I know Cracked has mentioned before how this is Sean Connery's final movie, but we only told you half the story. Buckle up, because it's gonna get extraordinarily dumb.)

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or LXG as they desperately tried to shorten it (because LEG would have sounded silly), is loosely based on an Alan Moore comic, itself loosely based on, like, 200 old novels. Connery teams up with gritty reboots of literary badasses like the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, and, um, Dorian Gray, to stop Sherlock Holmes' nemesis, who is also the Phantom of the Opera. Oh, shit, that was a spoiler.

3

Gene Hackman -- Welcome to Mooseport

20th Century Fox

The Movie:

Gene Hackman is a former U.S. president who runs for mayor of a small town against a plumber played by Ray Romano. You can squarely date this movie to the mid-2000 decade because it was done during that brief window of time when people thought political comedies and Ray Romano were viable forms of entertainment. By the way, when you watch the trailer for this movie, one of the suggestions at the end is a video of Hackman being given an Oscar for The French Connection, which proves that YouTube has become sentient and developed a sarcastic sense of humor.

The Fallout:

Hackman has never specifically pointed at Welcome to Mooseport as the movie that made him retire, but come on. He flat out stopped after this one. No voice-over work. No Levitra ads. He just stopped. He said: "The compromises that you have to make in films are just part of the beast, and it had gotten to a point where I just didn't feel like I wanted to do it anymore."

20th Century Fox
Beast = Moose, clearly.

The fact that this revelation presumably hit him while working on a completely run-of-the-mill comedy with Ray Romano is the funniest thing about the movie. Picture grumpy old Gene Hackman sitting silently on a set while someone adjusts a picture of his face over the crotch of a nude man (that is an actual scene from the movie, but I'll spare you the screenshot). Ray Romano comes over, awkwardly displaying his teeth as in every single photo of him that exists, and says in his depressed Kermit voice: "Are you ready for the scene, Gene?" Hackman slowly turns his head. "No, Ray. I don't think I am." He walks off of the set, starts running, and never stops. They have to finish the movie with CGI. (That's how it went in my imagination, anyway.)

20th Century Fox
"What the fuck? What the fuck am I doing with my life?" (Also, I lied.)

2

Omar Sharif -- The 13th Warrior

Touchstone Pictures

The Movie:

A movie about Antonio Banderas as a wimpy Arabian philanderer who travels across the world and ends up becoming a wimpy Viking. The possibly literally immortal Omar Sharif appears as Banderas' multi-purpose old guy (servant/mentor/Viking interpreter), although his actual function in the movie is sitting on a camel while wearing a turban so that people will think they're watching him in Lawrence of Arabia and not change the channel.

Columbia Pictures, Touchstone Pictures
"Ugh, it's the HD remaster where you can see all the wrinkles."

The Fallout:

Sharif's "retirement" after The 13th Warrior lasted only a few years, but I'm giving him a spot on this list because I think it's hilarious how angry he got at this movie. His part wasn't even that big -- it was probably a few days of shooting in exchange for a big paycheck, but it still made him say: "Let us stop this nonsense, these meal tickets that we do because it pays well ... bad pictures are very humiliating, I was really sick." He talks about this thing like it's his own personal Vietnam: "It is terrifying to have to do the dialogue from bad scripts, to face a director who does not know what he is doing, in a film so bad that it is not even worth exploring." Doctor Zhivago himself apparently wakes up in a cold sweat every night, replaying this in his head:

Touchstone Pictures

Touchstone Pictures

Touchstone Pictures

Touchstone Pictures
"The horror, the horror."

1

Greta Garbo -- Two-Faced Woman

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

The Movie:

Every serious dramatic actress has it: that one completely ridiculous movie they do when people start saying their roles are getting too heavy, so they decide to leave their dignity aside for a while. Glenn Close has Mars Attacks!, Meryl Streep has Death Becomes Her, and Greta Garbo (the original "intense movie lady") has Two-Faced Woman, a romantic comedy about a woman who pretends to be her own rumba-dancing twin sister to seduce her husband. It's a pretty standard plot. I could see Jennifer Lawrence doing that movie today, flopping, and then moving on with her career.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
They should keep that exact same tagline. Even the Garbo part. That is perfect.

The Fallout:

This silly little movie ruined Greta Garbo. Broke her. It was the Bane to her Batman. She was only 36, one of the great leading ladies of classic Hollywood, had three Oscar nominations, her previous film had been a huge hit ... and Two-Faced Woman ended everything. She called it "my grave" and didn't do another movie for the next 49 years, until she went to her actual grave.

Tage Olsin
No, I didn't Photoshop this. I went there and placed the sticker.

Again, this lady was so massively famous that most of you reading this right now have never seen even a single second of her movies, and you still know her name and occupation. She's synonymous with "good actress." By 1941 she had only one big flop, but she made up for it by hitting a home run with Ninotchka, which got Garbo her third Oscar nomination ... and third Oscar snub, but only because the Academy probably figured, "Eh, she's gonna keep making movies for decades, we'll give her one or five some other time."

But then this minor comedy that should have been a footnote in her career came along and fucked everything up like a discreet, mildly amusing rumba tornado. The reviews were brutal: Those smack-talkers at Time Magazine said Two-Faced Woman was "almost as shocking as seeing your mother drunk" (if your mom was 36 and actually still pretty hot). Garbo was so embarrassed that she went into a "temporary" retirement that she never came out of. It's not like the movie was so unfunny that she was blacklisted or something: She was still offered roles by famous directors, but she said no to most and had an awesome eye for only picking ones that never got made.

When the Academy gave Garbo an honorary Oscar in 1955 as a "hey, come on, we didn't mean it" gesture, she didn't bother to show up and they had to mail it to her house, which she rarely left by then. It's like she was so ashamed of that one so-so movie that she decided to live her life in exile as punishment. Be right back, gonna go steal some of her blood and inject it into Shia LaBeouf.

Maxwell Yezpitelok was recently interviewed on the occasion of his joint Nobel Prize/Teens Choice Award win. His Twitter is here.

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