What Are The Highest “Quality of Cast to Quality of Script” Ratios of All Time?

For reasons I cannot easily reconstruct, I screened Primal Fear on Netflix streaming this week. I remembered being disappointed by it when I saw it in the theaters, but hey, what did my barely-out-of-undergrad self know? Quite a lot — the movie is terrible, luridly incoherent and implausible in almost every detail, and I grade legal thrillers on a more generous curve than almost any other genre. The reason I decided to check again was that the cast was so strong — Laura Linney, Andre Braugher, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton, Maura Tierney, Alfre Woodard. Gere, the big star in the cast, is an underrated actor. You have to work to make a movie with that much talent unwatchable, but they did it.

It seems to be a self-evident truth that there are many more talented actors than their are talented directors and (especially) writers. So I’m pretty sure we can come up with some pictures that have squandered even more talent.