Top 10 Worst Movie Narrations Ever
#10: “Interview with the Vampire” (1994)
"Spider-Man: Far From Home" Cast Reacts to Meeting WatchMojo - FULL Interview
This Anne Rice adaptation about a pair of globetrotting, undead bloodsuckers has a pretty stacked cast for any genre, let alone horror. Brad Pitt plays reluctant vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac, the companion of the notorious vampire Lestat, who spills the gory deets on all their lamentable vampire antics. But Pitt’s narration throughout is not essential. Once we get the specifics of his life before Lestat turned him, it’s actually rather obtrusive. It also doesn’t do much to endear him to the audience. We get it. You hate being a vampire. It’s been so many years, get some new material.
#9: “Walk a Crooked Mile” (1948)
Top 10 Exact Movie Moments That Caused People to Walk Out
This is what happens when a film noir meets an anti-communist PSA. The result is arguably pretty bad, and Reed Hadley’s narration doesn’t help. His straightforward warnings about communism are so of their time, the very same dialogue might be read as parody today. Plus, it’s pretty useless, since what it tells us tends to be glaringly obvious. Why do we need to know how a two-way mirror works when you have a camera to show us? It’s one thing to include narration so the audience gets information that they might not be able to infer. But this voiceover is essentially just telling us what’s happening on screen.
#8: “Riddick” (2013)
Fans of “The Chronicles of Riddick” franchise were hoping to see a deeper and more introspective Richard B. Riddick in the series’ third installment. The first two movies have some level of voiceover, but its use in 2013’s “Riddick” stands out. Vin Diesel goes through some effort to make his voice heavy with gravitas and solemnity, but none of it is all that convincing. Granted, it would be hard to make any of the script’s “me against the world” clichés really work, because it’s already been done to death in other, more well-liked movies. Still, Riddick’s half-baked philosophizing doesn’t add character, it just adds noise – and the movie is already noisy enough.
#7: “Molly's Game” (2017)
Writer Aaron Sorkin’s directorial film debut got solid reviews. The tale of the queenpin of an illicit gambling empire is indeed exciting. And the movie is buoyed by fantastic acting from stars like Jessica Chastain, Kevin Costner, and Idris Elba. However, the roughly two-and-a-half-hour flick has been criticized for its overreliance on Chastain’s voiceover narration. Molly Bloom may be the point of view character, but much of her narration comes in the form of exposition. Details about the men who play her games and the spelling out of their motivations belie the rich psychology that Chastain gets to play out with her co-stars. If the story weren’t as good as it is, it probably wouldn’t be so frustrating when the voiceover disrupts the action.
#6: “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” (2007)
Even some fans of this underrated revisionist Western by Andrew Dominik find the voiceover, which is often largely copied directly from the source novel, to be a distraction. It doesn’t help that the language already evokes the distinctive sound of classic Western novels. The reading of these by words by the narrator, assistant editor Hugh Ross, seems weirdly disaffected. The movie is clearly trying something different, and like many artistic choices, whether or not one thinks they work is a matter of taste. But enough contemporary reviews — even largely positive ones — have criticized the narration. It feels more like one of the movie’s misses than not.
#5: “The Long Walk Home” (1990)
Every Movie in The Conjuring Universe Ranked from Worst to Best!
Whoopi Goldberg stars as Odessa, a worker in Alabama amid the Montgomery bus boycott. Though the movie mostly centers on Odessa, the woman narrating the story is white. Famed critic Roger Ebert, for one, took issue with this in his positive review. He felt it undermined the movie’s message and refocused the story from a white point of view. And it’s not hard to see what he means. For instance, the ending finds Odessa, her white employer Miriam, and Miriam’s daughter — the narrator — standing with others against racists. Yet the voiceover chooses to center the two white characters’ experience in the moment first, despite the film ending on a shot of Goldberg.
#4: “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” (2008)
Following two Americans on a soul-searching trip to Spain, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” was dubbed by many as something of a “return to form” for controversial writer-director Woody Allen. While his films don’t shy away from plundering the depths of human emotion and folly, they usually do so with a sense of humor. Yet “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” features narration by Christopher Evan Welch that’s long on exposition and rather short on entertainment. Its generic content and ambivalent reading can be quite off-putting, taking away from the story instead of enriching it. LA Times critic Kenneth Turan, for instance, called it “tedious.”
#3: “Sucker Punch” (2011)
This Zack Snyder fantasy action movie set in a mental health facility didn’t please everyone. One particular sticking point is the opening and closing narration, which indicates larger themes that the movie arguably fails to deliver on. These metaphors about angels, demons, and dragons are meant to be profound. Yet many critics agree the movie pays more attention to things like elaborate battle sequences than its supposed themes. It almost seems like these moments of voiceover are stuck on to make sure audiences get the point. But really, the story should be able to deliver its message on its own.
#2: “The Great Gatsby” (2013)
Top 10 Great Gatsby Trivia
Director and co-writer Baz Luhrmann makes an admirable attempt to capture what made the Roaring ‘20s so irresistible to people like narrator Nick Carraway. But no matter how electric or vibrant the movie looks and sounds, Tobey Maguire’s voiceover is lackluster. Mixing real quotes from the original F. Scott Fitzgerald novel with new ones already makes the narration seem disjointed. On top of that, the labored and raspy delivery sounds false, making Nick seem like a boy trying to sound older and wiser than he is. Even if that take worked for the character at this point in the story — which it arguably doesn’t — it makes for an awkward viewing experience.
#1: “Blade Runner” (1982)
Top 10 Amazing Facts You Didn't Know About Blade Runner 2049
Ridley Scott’s sci-fi movie had a long and troubled post-production, which saw changes made without the director’s OK. These edits included a different ending and a voiceover narration by actor Harrison Ford, who played none other than Rick Deckard. Ford, who is known as an easygoing and good-humored man, confessed to being completely against the voiceovers. And it’s really not hard to see why. In the original theatrical cut of the film, every ridiculous word he has to speak feels like it’s soaked in contempt. Even if he gave a reading worthy of the finest Shakespeare sonnet, it wouldn’t hide the fact that the narration makes this version significantly less entertaining.
