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The 5 Worst Musicians Turned Actor

 Yesterday we covered the very best musicians who tried their hand at acting: the ones who join Mark Wahlberg in the You’re Allowed to Keep Doing This Club. Today, we’re looking at the other end of the spectrum: the ones whose combination of ego, entitlement and plain old lack of talent created cinematic abominations that no amount of wishful thinking can erase. In many cases, they’re truly great musical artists, but their status as rock ‘n’ roll immortals only makes their onscreen failures more pronounced. As with our first list, we tried to select musicians who endeavored to genuinely act, not those who contented themselves with cameos or extended in-jokes. We also tried to take the volume of work into account, though in many cases a single performance was enough to prompt our righteous condemnation.

Dishonorable Mention: Madonna

Madonna seems perennially poised between cinematic Heaven and Hell. But as good as her best can be, her worst is truly awful.  Any figure so outsized is bound to succumb to her own hype, and her resume is clogged with embarrassing vanity projects that blew up in her face. Shanghai Surprise? Swept Away? Body of Evidence? She even managed to screw up her James Bond cameo… putting the nail in Pierce Brosnan’s 007 career as definitely as that stupid invisible car.

5. Elvis Presley

We love the King of Rock and Roll, and frankly speaking, his films can be fun. But “fun” doesn’t mean good, and while their camp value lets them tip-toe through the odd drunken screening, their overall cruddiness labels them guilty pleasures at best. And my God are there a lot of them. 31 titles – most featuring Elvis as the lead – and not a genuinely good film in the bunch. We don’t have any problem singing along to Clambake when the lights are out and nobody’s watching, but considering the man’s stature in pop culture, you’d think he could have turned in at least one good performance somewhere.

4. Mariah Carey

Carey wins out over a slew of fellow pop divas – including Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson – who thought their fans would cheerfully follow them off of a cinematic cliff. Her star vehicle Glitter proved a monstrous turkey: grossing just $5 million worldwide and landing Carey a Golden Raspberry for Worst Actress of 2001. She appears to have taken the hint, though she also blamed the film’s failure on September 11, which suggests a more pronounced state of denial. As long as there are prepackaged pop sensations out there, her sad example won’t be the last.

3. Sting

“I WILL KILL HIM!!!!”

The once and former Gordon Sumner gets credit for seeking out interesting projects that suit his persona rather than just gravitating towards star vehicles. And I concede that his supporting turn in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels works fairly well. But every time we feel like going easy on the guy, we pop in David Lynch’s Dune and there he is: chowing on scenery like it’s fillet mignon and delivering clocked-on-the-skull insanity dressed in nothing but a 201^st century Speedo. It gets worse in The Bride, where he sleep walks through the plum role of Dr. Frankenstein and allows his perversely arched eyebrows to do the work for him.  As with Carey, he wisely stepped aside after that, but the damage had been done. Few performers have seemed so well suited to acting and few have panned out more disastrously.

2. Mick Jagger

Jagger stumbled right out of the gate on the cinematic front, starring as the outlaw Ned Kelly in a silly biopic that failed on every conceivable level. Every ten years or so, he feels compelled to repeat the error, in such forgettable fare as The Man from Elysian Fields and a dreadful episode of Fairy Tale Theater. The dystopic Freejack, however, single-handedly propels him to Number Two on this list. As a would-be bounty hunter (in the employ of a seriously slumming Anthony Hopkins no less), he basically acts like he’s in an extended concert, sneering and prancing without bothering to actually enunciate his lines. Sure, he carries a bad-ass gun, but we’re laughing too hard to feel threatened by it.

1. Vanilla Ice

The Iceman represents every flash in the pan who tried to cash in with a movie deal: every ephemeral chart-topper who vanished without a trace after eighteen months but who nonetheless found the time to make his own movie. Their ranks stretch on into infinity… but none achieved the loopy, monosyllabic genius of Vanilla Ice in his sole screen appearance, Cool as Ice. He plays a rebellious, fun-loving motorcycle hood – goofy haircut and hideous wardrobe intact – wooing the local good girl and saving her father from a gang of corrupt cops. It attains a kind of exquisite jeweled perfection of awfulness: such a staggering, awe-inspiring failure that generations yet unborn will still speak of it in hushed whispers. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski escaped the carnage to become Steven Spielberg’s go-to guy. Ice had no such luck: delivering the final punchline to a career that stands as one long, sad joke.