The 10 Worst Matt Damon Movies Ranked

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Matt Damon isn't just a guy seemingly permanently attached to Ben Affleck. He's — with his long-time best bud — an Academy Award-winning screenwriter for "Good Will Hunting," with a Best Actor nomination for his performance as the down-on-his-luck math scholar. He's an activist and philanthropist. He's even got a good sense of humor, turning up in bizarre cameos in flicks like "Deadpool" and "Eurotrip," the latter letting him loose as a punk rocker with one good tune in one of the best running gags in comedy.

A steady worker since the '90s, Damon remains one of Hollywood's best and most bankable. At the time of writing, we're less than a year away from watching his turn as Odysseus in Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," a film so anticipated that theaters are already selling seats. But not everything about Matt Damon is perfect. He did shill crypto once, and we forgive him for that; you can't stay mad at a dude who took his lampooning in "Team America World Police" with polite grace. But not every flick he's made is a good one. We're running down the 10 worst movies Matt Damon's starred in, with a tilt toward that same graciousness. If one thing is consistent about all these films, it's that Damon always gives his best to the audience.

The Western flop "All the Pretty Horses" came out seven years before another adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel, "No Country for Old Men," and we're lucky it's the Coen Brothers' film that would go on to define how we picture McCarthy's dusty, often pessimistic vision of American life. His "All the Pretty Horses" is a Western taking place at the very end of that individualistic era, where a horse and a Colt pistol represent a family's unraveling ties to an old way of life.

The film adaptation, directed by an improbable Billy Bob Thornton, does not nail any of the melancholy tone, nor does it feel like an elegy for the West that never was. It feels like a Nicholas Sparks romance, chopped apart by dodgy editing, and its pacing muddled in no small amount by the interference of the now-infamous abuser Harvey Weinstein. Matt Damon is also wildly babyfaced with a cute little nose, never nailing the hard features a "real" cowboy in a cowboy flick would wear by the end of his travails. Fortunately, he'd worked on that by the time "True Grit" came along.

Going after the controversial practice of fracking is a damn good idea for a movie. It's a real-life topic of major concern for people living in rural America, where it's polluting the water and the soil people need to survive. In 2012, "Promised Land" became one of the first major movies to use it as its central drama, which was a great pick, especially as it pissed off a whole lot of petroleum lobbyists. The problem with "Promised Land" is that it's not very good at keeping the pressure on. It is, however, a pretty good appetizer if you're interested in watching "Landman."

As a human drama, the movie isn't terrible. There's even a painfully adroit subplot where an overzealous environmental advocate is eventually unmasked by Matt Damon's Steve as a paid actor for the oil company at the center of the conflict. But it limps through its high-octane moments and closes out the film with a boring final act. "Promised Land" wants the same intensity and zing as a previous environmental drama, "A Civil Action," but can't quite juggle the same ingredients together into something satisfying. Overall, just a frustrating film with a good heart.

Based on a terrific bit of real history — during World War II, an elite unit of artists and art historians, one of whom would later head up the Metropolitan Museum of Art as its directors, dove into the European theatre to track and rescue stolen art and artifacts from Nazi caches — "The Monuments Men" is a brilliant idea for a heist drama-slash-war movie.

Unfortunately, despite the charisma of stars Matt Damon and George Clooney, there's just not enough juice in this ensemble flick to save it from being one of the most boring movies of 2014. Nobody gets enough time to build a rapport with anyone else, as this would-be "Ocean's Eleven" prequel zips through set pieces that lose everything that made the actual history into a special reminder that humanity is sometimes pretty okay. The real-life Monuments Men weren't John Wicks with art degrees; they were smart, savvy, frightened dudes trying to do the right thing by history. Serious advice: go read the non-fiction book by Robert M. Edsel instead.

One of the most unfortunate types of Film Guy is the guy who won't shut up about Terry Gilliam. It's not entirely undeserved. Gilliam, a Monty Python alum who both directed one of their best flicks, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," and animated the group's bizarre, often mid-skit illustrations, is a genuinely gifted creator. But he's not above some terrific failures, including a persistent fondness for Johnny Depp and being a bitter old goat about diversity and inclusion. Oh, and a couple of his films stink, too, like "The Brothers Grimm," which is simply a hot mess incarnate.

Matt Damon and Heath Ledger are Will and Jake Grimm — yes, as in the fairy tale guys. In Gilliam's imagining, they become scammers who use their stories to gin up work as they scramble from village to village. But because this is a Gilliam, for better or worse, reality and fiction begin to overlap, and the Grimm brothers end up in a soggy fanfic based loosely on "Snow White." It doesn't really go anywhere interesting with all of this, plodding on through folklore story beats until everyone gets a happy ending. Contrast this film with "Stardust," which follows a clear vision and offers an earnestness that can bring an honest smile to anyone's face.

Calling something "not the worst Farrelly Brothers movie" is some backhanded praise, but we're gonna say it anyway. "Stuck on You" isn't just a pretty good old Lionel Ritchie tune. It's a movie about a pair of conjoined twins fumbling through life together despite having two very different personalities. Yeah, this is ... definitely a Farrelly premise, huh?

Walt, played by Greg Kinnear, wants to be a star. Bob, our man Matt Damon, wants to be a small-town homebody. In a normal drama, this would be enough to feed the entire career of one dedicated therapist. But because this very much not that, the pair decides to try and both live their lives in the most overcomplicated, dumbass ways possible. Walt even attempts to try and hide being conjoined for a while until it leaks out, somehow not by TMZ.

At least they offer a genuinely plausible medical reason for why the twins haven't been medically separated, and it's a big part of a (relatively) wholesome final act where the lads realize they really are happier together. It's weird to say this movie treats being conjoined with more respect than you'd expect, but hey, it is true.

Director Clint Eastwood will, on occasion, step out of his comfort zone of movies about grumpy old men, veterans, cowboys, etc, and sometimes the results are decent. And then there was Matt Damon starring in 2010's "Hereafter," the rare Eastwood flick you probably forgot existed.

There was a weird batch of psychic connection movies for about a decade; films like "White Noise" and "The Others," with varying reasons why. "Hereafter" chose to focus on people united by tragedy, with Matt Damon playing the low-key psychic George, who connects several plot lines together. It's maybe not a bad idea in general, and George is the kind of medium that doesn't have a pay-per-minute telephone line. However, the resulting movie is the very definition of milquetoast, though it had its share of defenders; Roger Ebert, for one, gave "Hereafter" a perfect score. 

What the film says about our human connections lasting beyond death is covered in 20 pages of the average Mitch Albom weepie novel. It even features a wedged-in romantic plot line, because Eastwood's understanding of story beats probably came from a Screenwriting 101 guide. Mostly, "Hereafter" feels simply unnecessary, although Damon, along with the rest of the cast, does his best to carry the thing along.

"The Legend of Bagger Vance" should have been a "Boondocks" joke and nothing else. Based on a "Field of Dreams"-style novel by Steven Pressfield and patterned, if you can believe this, on the Bhagavad Gita (Bagger Vance, Bhagavad, no, seriously), the only reason this movie isn't still the poster child for using the Magical Negro stereotype is because "Green Book," with its cardboard cutout use of Mahershala Ali, won Best Picture almost two decades later.

That probably chaps at the film's titular star, Will Smith, who's the supernatural golf guide to Matt Damon's damaged World War I veteran Rannulph Junah. (R. Junah. Arjuna. Get it?) Bagger's deftly at Junah's side whenever the sad white guy needs help with his golf form, until the sad white guy isn't as sad and his golf game has improved. Then Bagger Vance slips away like the ghostly mentor he is, until the movie's old white narrator — yes, they're framing this dog like it's "The Princess Bride" — is ready to pass on from old age. Then Bagger Vance descends one more time to guide the dude to heaven. Spike Lee will fight people in real life over this movie, and he's right to do it.

Matt Damon makes "We Bought A Zoo" watchable despite its smarmy, treacly cuteness. Nominally based on a true story, the movie boils down to what we realize today is a dangerously seductive and persistent real-life issue: Men will literally buy a busted-ass zoo to restore instead of going to therapy.

Damon plays grieving widower Benjamin Mee — the original memoir's author — who uproots his also grieving two kids to move into zooland, pushing his son, Dylan, further into mental seclusion instead of, you know, sending the kid to therapy. No, playing with peacocks and nurturing sick tigers (to be fair, Mee gets full marks for how he treats his new charges) is all you need to heal a family.

It's a rad idea, sure, and I suppose it helps that Mee finds love with a 28-year-old zookeeper (she would have been 14 when his son was born, but whatever) who's played by Scarlett Johansson. So, naturally, things turn out okay for everyone eventually, all because Mee believes you just gotta lock in with 20 seconds of bravery when it matters. Still, one must stress: Please start with therapy. Then buy a houseplant. Then buy the zoo.

Most fans deride the Matt Damon sci-fi vehicle "Elysium," which manages some cogent points in between ultraviolence and weird anime nonsense, instead of remembering that "Downsizing" exists. It's a movie with a central pulp science fiction Big Idea in search of a plot, which never really happens in favor of varying set pieces of varying moods. Billed as a comedy-drama, there's not much that's funny about Matt Damon's character, Paul, losing his wife, his career, and his home thanks to a well-intentioned attempt to physically downsize his body in order to lessen the environmental impact on Earth.

There's not much funny about the impending environmental apocalypse, of which the practice of downsizing has not altered a whit, either. Instead, the movie ends with Paul choosing to live a vaguely Buddhist life, taking care of downsizers who live in poverty while the probable end of the world inches (har) closer, and all the richer downsized people go live in a cultish vault to survive. Unable to pick one theme to hammer on about, the result is a pretentious mess of a flick that doesn't have a lick of the camp absurdity that gave John Cusack's desperate struggle for humanity's survival in "2012" a weird amount of impact.

Attempting to blend Chinese and American blockbuster styles together for maximum global impact is an understandable desire, especially if you're a studio executive looking for the golden ratio of profit. "The Great Wall" even gets points for successfully handling the same issue as "The Last Samurai," i.e., despite having Western guys at the fore of marketing (Matt Damon and current Hollywood apex star Pedro Pascal), they're not the real heroes here. That's about all the kindness that can be said for this joint Chinese-American production.

No, wait, there is one more nice idea: Those ancient Chinese taotie motifs are mysterious enough to lend themselves perfectly to a big SF idea that they're representations of aliens. But then the whole thing devolves into standard "kill the hive queen to save the day despite the impossible odds" garbage. Boiled down, it's a riff on "Reign of Fire" with a veneer of Chinese history, and that's not a favorable comparison for any movie.

"The Great Wall" doesn't have the courage to do anything particularly neat with its set pieces, settling for generic blockbuster shininess and no real character development or plot. Damon and Pascal move around the screen, doing stuff and yelling things, but none of it feels like it matters in anything but the most generic of ways. Director Zhang Yimou is one of China's best creators. Watch literally any other one of his wuxia films instead.