Worst miscasting you've ever seen.

I'm going to make a controversial opinion and say that Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrence in The Shining was horrible casting that completely ruined the movie for me. Yes, I didn't like the movie and completely understand Stephen King not liking it either.

Now I know what you might be thinking "Ore Rosechu, you ignorant slut. Do you not remember how fucking insane Jack is in that movie? The iconic "Here's Johnny!" and just how unpleasant and cold he is throughout?"

And here is where I said "Yeah, that is awesome, in a vacuum, but it fucking sucks in context."

The point of the story is that Jack Torrence is a good man with a somewhat shady past, I mean he's not father of the year, but he's trying his best to put it all behind him and be a better person.. The story starts with him being lovable with his charm yet believable with his flaws, but the isolation he and his family go through in that haunted Hotel, drives him insane and he starts chopping away at the ones he claims to love best.

In The Shining movie, this doesn't happen and the story fails to work. Because I don't see this lovable family man trying to better and sliding back not just back to his lowest point, but even further down than that into a full blown psycho. Jack Torrence starts as a psycho, and doesn't really go further down the rabbit hole.. You just begin with a guy who is obviously a crazy ax murderer, and because it's the 70's and violence against women isn't taken seriously yet his wife goes with him despite every red flag as there is no alternative outside of being chained to her husband.

It's not suspense, shock, or character building, it's "Well that went about as fucking poorly as I can expect."

Homer Simpson is a more convincing fall to darkness character in the parody of the Shining that Treehouse of Horror did.

I mean shit, compare that to Friday the 13th where Mrs. Vorhees shows up at the end and you think she's there to get our survivor out of the woods and call the cops on our killer... Then she starts to explain who she is and rapidly degrades into a madwoman as her facade rips.

That one little scene does what the Shining tries to do better than the entirety of the Shining.

And fuck you The Shining for me saying that something in a Friday the 13th movie was better than the entirety of a Stanley Kubrick film.

tl;dr Jack Nicholson in The Shining is like if the Star Wars prequels had Anakin literally be a child-sized mini-me version of Darth Vader in Episode 1

 

I am surprised nobody mentioned Joe Don Baker being casted in all of these action movies as the main character which is supposed to be some badass even though he has a dad bod and looks nothing like the character he is supposed to portray.

 

John Travolta as John Gotti in this 2018 disasterpiece, Gotti. It's painfully obvious that they only chose him because the 8 year production of the movie was floundering, and they wanted having a big name star in the lead role to save the movie. This is made even worse by the fact that John Travolta looks nothing like John Gotti either. Like really? They couldn't even get a fat Italian guy to play John Gotti? They had to go with a famous actor of Italian descent that doesn't even look like him? The movie itself is by far the worst Mafia movie I've ever seen too. The acting is like a High School play performance of Goodfellas. It's one of the few films to have a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes too, and having seen it, I can safely say that was well earned. Was the poster not enough to convince you yet that John Travolta in this movie looks nothing like John Gotti? Then have a look at this side by side comparison below.

Spoiler: Actual Gotti vs. Travolta Gotti

 

The only "Italian thing" is that hairline but even that is just being generous. And I haven't even seen or heard of this movie until just now. At least Travolta has another flop under his belt to go with Battlefield Earth.

 

John Travolta is actually of Irish-Italian descent, but he also just looks nothing like John Gotti. If the contrast images didn't pour enough salt in the wound, just compare this FBI mugshot of John Gotti taken in late 1990 to the movie poster, where Travolta is in roughly the same pose as the real Gotti was here.

Spoiler: John Gotti 33 years ago

Far too many people forget that an actor being famous and accomplished doesn't mean shit if they're given bad direction, and a role that just doesn't suit them. It's not like Travolta couldn't play a good mobster previously too. Just look at a much younger Travolta as Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction 24 years prior. He did good as Marcellus Wallace's hitman and Jules Winnfield's partner in crime in that movie.

 

Looks like him to me.. but then again I have autism and facial blindness is strong wirh me.

It's actually a big reason why I prefer animated media to live action. In some films unless proper costuming or the cast has varied enough appearances (Going back to my shining example, I'm obviously not getting Jack and his wife mixed up) is done, I can legitimately have trouble telling characters apart.

Any media that is going to really catch my interest requires all characters to have distinct silhouettes. (I imagine this is a big reason why Hazbin Hotel had a dedicated fandom willing to wait literal years for the show to actually start. We Autists love our distinct silhouettes)

That said most people are not autistic, so I'd imagine most would be able to tell more easily.

After spending a solid two minutes only now do I realize that Gotti's eyes are far more sunken than Travolta's in the comparison picture.

(You know now why Chris thought pictures of different women were the same girl)

 

I think the most obvious one to me, aside from them having pretty different facial features when you look closely, as juvenile as it sounds, is the fact that John Travolta isn't overweight. Part of why I'm so familiar with what Gotti looks like, is because I've seen the press and court footage of him in documentaries many times since I was in Middle School, and growing up as a New York state native I always saw news coverage about the mob history surrounding him. The real John Gotti was 5'10, and around 250 pounds.

It's not like it would've been impossible to get Travolta to look a bit more like him, given the state of movie prosthetics by the late 2010s. You can make an actor look a lot fatter than they actually are without getting into cartoonish fat suit territory, and looking like Fat Bastard from Austin Powers. That being said, even if they did that, I think Travolta just wasn't a good fit for the role to begin with. Even if he's the same ethnicity as Gotti, his father being the son of Sicilian immigrants.