Even five-year-olds know that RIPD is a pre-ordained dead duck, or at least that it will be beaten handily by The Conjuring, which I saw a couple of nights ago and is “scary” but not that great, let me tell you, and which certainly ends on a phony upbeat note. But in the view of Variety‘s Scott Foundas RIPD can at least boast of a noteworthy fuck-all performance from Jeff Bridges. “Like Johnny Depp’s work in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, it’s a performance that seems to say, ‘Look, I’m here for the payday. You know it. I know it. But as long as I’m here, I’m going to make things interesting for myself.’

This of course requires a list of Great Corrupt Performances from the HE readership. Performances that candidly admit that the movie is shit or megaplex crap but what the hell — “Life is short and I’m being decently or exorbitantly paid and so I’m going to have as much fun as I can with this bullshit…ride along with me or not.”

One of these performances is Jon Voight‘s in Anaconda. 50% of all Michael Caine-starring movies made after The Swarm are performed in this vein.

“Bridges hurls himself into Roy with such comic abandon that it’s tough to know how much of the character was there on the page and how much was being invented by the actor himself as he went along,” Foundas writes. “Rattling his trap nonstop, with a particular fondness for the gory details of his earthly demise (picked apart by coyotes in the desert), Roy doesn’t suffer fools or new partners gladly, but can turn suddenly fragile if anyone dares criticize him, at one point whipping out a squeezebox and wailing a hilariously maudlin ballad called ‘The Better Man’ (co-written by Bridges and regular Coen brothers collaborator T-Bone Burnett).”