Top 5 Worst Movie Accents

Meryl Streep makes speaking in tongues seem so easy.

Try watching some of Streep’s acting peers pull off the same feat and you’ll want to puncture your ear drums with the nearest sharp object.

Here’s the worst of the lot — five actors who got pinned by an accent on film:

• Kevin Costner in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” – Costner would redeem himself partially a few years later with his full-throttled Bostonian accent in “Thirteen Days” (a criminally underappreciated flick even if some hated Costner’s accent as much as I liked it). But his turn as Robin Hood stands as a vocal catastrophe.
• Keanu Reeves in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Another perfect example of box office prowess forcing studios to insert actors into projects where they don’t belong.
• Brad Pitt in “The Devil’s Own” – Did you know you, too, could talk in an Irish brogue if you just speak in a higher voice at the end of every sentence? Try it!
• Madonna in “The Next Best Thing” – It’s easy to pick almost any Madonna movie for this honor, since she’s either botching a given accent or speaking in her own faux British one. So I’ll select “Thing” because her vocal performance is endlessly distracting.
• The cast of “Valkyrie” – OK, I understand forcing a Big Movie Star like Tom Cruise to attempt an accent he can’t master makes little sense. So why surround Cruise with a mostly British cast if you’re making a story set in Germany?

(Photo: Two-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep can master virtually any accent faster than you can make a pot of coffee.)

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