No one hurts you more than the ones you love. That's true when it comes to acting performances too, as some of this year's worst displays of acting were given to us by some of our absolute favorites as a staff. Sure, there's the odd amateur who doesn't have any business landing a professional acting role and stinking up our cinemas, but often the worst result comes from expectation. A few of these performances below broke our hearts a little.

We jumped on the Jessica Chastain bandwagon early as a group - in her breakout year of 2011, she scored three nominations from us in acting categories, with three others in the intervening years. That makes this so much harder, but... Jessica, you just sucked in Dark Phoenix as the lead villain, a shapeshifting alien bent on helping Jean Grey destroy the universe. But never has someone seemed so bored with the end of all existence, and she seems utterly lost in the attempt at menace. Chastain is capable of wonderful, deep, emotional, funny performances ... but elevated comic book acting just isn't remotely in her wheelhouse. And when that's needed to anchor the main conflict in your story? Well, sleepy and breathless just ain't gonna cut it.

Sylvester Stallone has shown in the past few years that he does still have some life left in him, even in revisiting characters from long, long ago in his career. It's not that he has the greatest range, but is capable of some depth of emotion. With his role in Rambo: Last Blood, our second place finisher, time has apparently washed away all emotion. Which, OK, you want to make your character tortured and internal and suffering from decades of PTSD ... but that isn't just showing us *nothing* and grunting unintelligibly through your performance. There's a reason why Stallone's terrible action-film acting became such a punchline, and this takes him right back to those days.

The downward slide in talent lands us in third place with John Cena's performance in Playing With Fire. While it's a fairly harmless little kids film, Cena's block-of-wood charisma is on full display here, and you'd probably be forgiven for thinking he was learning his lines on his first take, just off screen. Cena is stranded without a competent script, but he mostly substitutes looking embarrassed and acting with his biceps and pecs for the ability to bring the comedy. There's a reason you only set pros loose without a script.

Fourth spot goes to another Dark Phoenix actor, Sophie Turner. Called upon to play the title role as Jean Grey's alter-ego with universe-destroying powers, she gets lost in trying to portray tortured and intoxicated by power, and just ends up slightly left of "bitchy".

Double-nominations are a frequent occurrence in The Calvins, with Worst Performance being no exception. Will Smith takes home a two-fer this year in fifth and sixth place, for his roles in Aladdin and Gemini Man. While it's unfair to really compare him against Robin Williams' voice-only performance in the original film, Smith falls well short of the manic energy needed to make the "anything's possible" character work, serving as an anchor in the middle of the film.

With Gemini Man, we get two terrible performances for the price of one, with Smith playing both his current aged self as an assassin for hire, as well as his Fresh-Prince-era younger clone. Director Ang Lee's pursuit of digital and technical wizardry strands Smith without an actual role to play, and he's left to just brood for two hours.

I will spare you the puns about Jon Hamm's name as he grabs seventh place here for his role in Richard Jewell, but he's a cartoon villain in Clint Eastwood's twisting of the story of the Atlanta Olympics bombing, practically twirling a non-existent mustache as a railroading FBI agent. Some of this is Eastwood's fault, but Hamm brings no subtlety or nuance to the role whatsoever.

Ninth place gives us Rebel Wilson in Isn't It Romantic, as the lead in a romantic comedy about how romantic comedies are terrible. With a one-note, overly broad attempt at comedy, she ends up mugging to the cheap seats for the blessedly-short running time.

Our final slot goes to James McAvoy in Glass, who ramps up his multiple-personality performance in Split to epic proportions. While that had some novelty, even some showmanship, in the first case, in Glass it became grotesque and cartoonish, like a magician trying to impress you with the same trick twice in a row.

2020 Calvin Awards
Calvins Intro
Best Actor
Best Actress
Best Cast
Best Character
Best Director
Best Overlooked Film
Best Picture
Best Scene
Best Screenplay
Best Supporting Actor
Best Supporting Actress
Best TV Show
Best Use of Music
Breakthrough Performance
Worst Performance
Worst Picture

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