By Brandon Nolta
When people talk about movies with friends or colleagues, they often mention cool scenes or nifty plot developments. These things are part of why we go to movies, after all. But, there’s an even more vital part of film that virtually everybody can appreciate: dialogue. It’s the dialogue that gets bandied about more, anyway; do a search on “movie quotes” and get a sense of what I mean.
All moviegoers know that great dialogue can stay with you forever, but what about really bad dialogue? Lines that come across as dumb, or hit the ear like ball bearings in a sock; these kinds of dialogue can take a viewer right out of a film and make them goggle at the screen, certain they just didn’t hear what they thought they heard. That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about here, with this very list of Worst Damn Dialogue in a Movie. To qualify for the list, it has to be more than stupid or clumsy; it has to seriously affect the plot, or in some cases, the opinion of the movie as a whole. Some of these lines belong to otherwise good films, but they stick out in my memory of the film, and so I share them with you, dear readers. Spreading the pain around, if you will. In no particular order, they are:
THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, “I thought Christmas only comes once a year.”
Whatever respect I had for this decent Bond effort went right out the damn window with this line. I mean, asking audiences to accept the intensely hot but vapid-eyed Denise Richards as a nuclear physicist is hard enough, but when Pierce Brosnan uttered this line at the end of the film, the groans from the audience nearly blew the screen through the back of the multiplex. I will say this, however, in its favor: I had to respect Brosnan for actually saying it with a straight face. Dear God, how many takes must the poor man have gone through? I bet he wanted to hit the screenwriters for this one. Even by Bond standards, this one-liner was execrable.
TOTAL RECALL, “Give those people air!”
Picking a ridiculous Schwarzenegger line out of his body of work might seem like looking for a needle in a basket of needles. It’s not so much where you begin, but where do you stop? Once you take out the few films where his dialogue was fitting and crafted to the story as opposed to his persona, there’s lots of bad puns and dumb lines left … and that’s not even considering the occasional weirdness his accent throws in (although you have to give the man credit; he worked his ass off to master the language, and considering where he started, his accent has faded to a huge extent). Still, what makes this line risible is a perfect storm of factors: the melodramatic interplay between Ronny Cox, Michael Ironside and Schwarzenegger (Arnie is in fact the most subdued actor in this scene), the intense earnestness of the line, and Arnold’s accent choosing to kick in at that moment and turn “air” into … is that three syllables I hear? I love this movie, and consider it one of Arnie’s best, yet this line is always the first one I think of.
X-MEN, “Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else.”
This line probably made more sense in the original part that Joss Whedon wrote, before the studio and the five other writers who worked on this script made changes. I’ve seen Halle Berry act in other films, so I know she can, but she hadn’t quite gotten around to it with Storm yet, and her delivery of this line didn’t help. However, I don’t blame her for this one; I bet she didn’t know what the hell the line meant, and thus wasn’t sure how to say it. At least, I hope that’s what it was. Maybe the part that made sense, the part with all the acting and stuff, got left on the cutting room floor. Anyway, this may be the biggest WTF dialogue on the list. As I remember, Toad (Ray Park) looked pretty confused too, and he presumably had the script, so I don’t feel so bad.
RESERVOIR DOGS, Mr. Brown’s dissertation on “Like a Virgin”
Quentin Tarantino is one hell of a director, and an even better writer, but he’s no great shakes as an actor, and his long speech on the meaning of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” would have sounded half as asinine and twice as funny coming from anybody else sitting at the table. Here’s an example of an otherwise damn good movie nearly being derailed by a misplaced bit at the beginning. The speech as written doesn’t really do much for me anyway, especially by the middle where QT seems determined to pointlessly fit “dick” into a sentence as many times as he can shoehorn it in, but it’s the delivery that completely cripples the speech. If you know the speech (and I imagine most of you reading this do), imagine it coming from Lawrence Tierney, Michael Madsen or Steve Buscemi, and see if it doesn’t work better. QT as an actor doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of timing or pace; he pooched a perfectly good joke in DESPERADO through the same flaw. Keep the man behind the camera, and everything will be fine.
BATMAN AND ROBIN, any line uttered by any character
As a die-hard Batman fan, I had to go see this film, even though I was still troubled by the Day-Glo and neon sensibility Joel Schumacher brought to its predecessor, BATMAN FOREVER. Also, I was intrigued by the thought of Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy, and had a faint hope the movie might be interesting. Well, it was, in the sense that performing a colonoscopy on yourself with a red-hot poker might be interesting. It sure as hell wasn’t boring. I actually became physically sick while watching this movie and missed out on the climax because I was puking in the restroom. That was a sign. It was probably the bad fast food I ate before the movie, but the fact that every single line I heard was an execrable pun, pitched at brain-damaged alcoholics or a sinister combination of both didn’t help. Schwarzenegger at least attacked his role with some glee; everybody else looked like they were standing on the slopes of Hell wearing axle grease shoes. In trying to recall this film, I get as far as bad puns about ice before my ears start bleeding, so I’ll just leave it at that.