Who’s that girl, running around with you. No seriously, who is she? The credits says she’s Princess Diana, but she looks like Joan Rivers after falling off the back of a speedboat. But while there are few things that’ll cut the strings of your suspension of disbelief faster than a bad celebrity impersonator – wait a second, that guy in a dress is supposed to be the Queen? – occasionally there are impressions so awful they ascend to the realm of art. Well, maybe if you spell “art” with an f at the front, because the following just stink more than usual.
10: Michael Chiklis as John Belushi in Wired.
What, Jim Belushi wasn’t answering his phone so they had to get The Commish? To be fair, John Belushi is actually dead and a ghost in this film, so for all anyone not near a Ouija board knows Chiklis’ work as Ghost Belushi is dead-on. And if they’d had the guts to call this film
Ghost Belushi this would have done at least as well as Ghost Dad instead of being a massive box office flop that drove Chiklis into a hi-paying and critically acclaimed career as Mex-bashing cop Vic Mackie on
The Shield.
9: Robert Wisden as Richard Nixon in Watchmen.
Yeah, this is supposed to be one of those alternative universe deals, but they forgot to mention the part where President Nixon fell face-first into a tree-shredder and lived. Eric Clapton’s pillow looks more like Richard Nixon than this guy does.
8: Casper Van Dien as James Dean in James Dean: Race With Destiny.
Apart from the obvious problem – James Dean was an actor who could act, Van Dien is a chunk of concrete who can arrange his features to vaguely resemble Chesty Bond – this totally doesn’t work because the role Van Dien was born to play is not a bisexual human ashtray but the baddest clean-cut badass ever: Johnny Rico from Starship Troopers. Maybe if they’d thrown in a couple scenes where Dean fights off giant bugs using his aeroball skills this would’ve worked. But probably not.
7: Lyndall Grant as The Governator in 2012.
Director Roland Emmerich almost deserve props for going with the comedy Ar-nuld impersonator as the Governor of Earthquake Themepark. But then thanks to this ten second komedy kameo the entire rest of the film becomes an edge-of-the-seat wait for Arnold to bust out of the lava with his endoskeleton showing through his burnt flesh and then machine-gun a bunch of passing Tibetans. Also, having an actor playing a politician who used to be an actor in a movie is the kind of thing that causes black holes, which is probably why there’s no clips of this scene available.
6: Derek Luke as Sean “Puffy” Combs in Notorious.
The guy playing Tupac is actually an even worse performer, mostly because his version of Tupac is a slightly effeminate ballet dancer instead of… well, a slightly effeminate ballet dancer. But Puff Daddy gets the points here for introducing himself in every scene just in case we forget who he’s supposed to be. Which is a good idea, as every scene he’s in is one less scene where Li’l Kim can act like a freak.
5: Everyone in Death Becomes Her.
Back when Bruce Willis though he could do “ha-ha” comedy instead of just “smirk” comedy, he was involved in this toxic gas bubble from the depths of suck. Supposedly about some kind of eternal life formula that kept you alive no matter how much of a pounding you took, this is remembered today solely for the use of early CGI to put a hole in Goldie Hawn’s torso, and not at all for the completely rubbish celebrity impersonators (Elvis isn’t dead – WHAAAAA?!?) who lurk around the final scenes. Mind you, the amount of make-up slathered on both Hawn and Meryl Streep doesn’t rule out the possibility that their roles were also played by impersonators as well.
4: Jamie-Lyn Sigler as Heidi Fleiss in Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss
Aw look, it’s Meadow Soprano and she’s all grown up! And a high-priced Hollywood madam. Unfortunately, in real life Fleiss looks like one of the drained-dry victims of the life-sucking space vampires in Lifeforce, while Sigler looks like she’s actually eaten dinner at least once in her life.
3: Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice in W.
Maybe if Oliver Stone had bothered to figure out whether he was making a serious look at the inner workings of a war-bent White House or a frat house comedy with Dick Cheney as Secretary of Partying Down, then the usually watchable Newton would’ve had someone to tell her what level to pitch her performance at. But Stone was too busy hanging out with Fidel Castro or something, and so we get to see up on the big screen the kind of impression MadTV would reject as “too broad”.
2: John Michael Higgins as David Letterman in The Late Shift
How could this go so badly wrong? It’s not like the usually excellent Higgins - he’s the voice of Mentok the Mindtaker on Harvey Birdman, you fools! - was asked to play Shakespeare or some other dude we don’t know anything about. Letterman’s on TV every night, and he sure doesn’t look like this. Perhaps if he’d hid in a cupboard and given his performance from there like Jay Leno does no-one would’ve noticed. Or maybe they could have gone through every single Letterman appearance and edited together a performance from individual words - twenty-seven snap costume and background changes per sentence couldn’t have been more distracting than this.
1: Every single celebrity impersonator in the Epic Movie / Disaster Movie / Meet the Spartans / Whatever series
These just plain suck. What’s that you say? Paris Hilton is a whore, Britney Spears is a skank, Michael Jackson likes little kids and Borat… is just standing over there for no reason at all? It’s like the entire world of movies threw up into a bucket and tried to sell it as raspberry ripple ice-cream.