I don’t think a movie star can elevate poorly written and directed material enough to actually make it good and worth checking out. That’s my point.

Like, you mentioned The Ladykillers. It is *clearly* well-directed, and while I don’t love it, there are also *multiple* really good performances in it, so clearly there’s enough in the script for actors to chew on to make it worthwhile.

For movies that Hanks has been in that i think *were* poorly written and directed— The Da Vinci Code, Pinocchio, The Circle, A Hologram For The King, etc— I also do not think Hanks is good.

If a single actor shines in a movie, then the script, while uneven, must give that actor enough to work with to allow them to shine— or the director shoots the actor’s scenes stylishly and effectively despite not being able to consistently tell the story.

Y’all can argue about Smith all you want, lol, I don’t really care enough about him to fight back on that. I think he’s a very good actor who’s made too many bad choices over the last decade. You all disagree, that’s fine.

I just don’t think that an actor’s goodness is remotely defined by their ability to “make bad material and bad direction worth watching.” Because I think that is, with insanely rare exception, not a thing. Can actors emerge unscathed from otherwise bad movies? Yes! But then their material in the movie was better than the rest of the movie’s material— your Margot Robbie-Suicide Squad mention is a *great* example of this, lol. Or Tom Cruise in Rock of Ages— Adam Shankman is, if nothing else, a great director of musical numbers who absolutely knows how to shoot a star like they’re a star.