The Best and Worst of Mila Kunis

“The Best and Worst of” series chronicles the career highlights and lowlights of an actor starring in one of the week's new theatrical releases. This week, I take a look at the filmography of “The Spy Who Dumped Me” star Mila Kunis.

Films starring Mila Kunis that I've seen:
Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Max Payne
Extract
The Book of Eli
Date Night
Black Swan
Friends with Benefits
Ted
Oz the Great and Powerful
Jupiter Ascending
Bad Moms
A Bad Moms Christmas 

Best Performance: Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Kunis' immense likability is her strongest suit as an actor and that charm was particularly abundant in her role as hotel receptionist Rachel Jensen in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The warmth Kunis brought to this character made the playful dynamic between Rachel and Peter Bretter (the equally likable Jason Segel) feel natural as well as the eventual progression into a romantic relationship worth rooting for.

Worst Performance: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
The wooden acting plague swept through the Jupiter Ascending set and Kunis was not spared. In fact, she might've come down with the worst case of the entire cast. There's a strong chance that a wax doll who could only speak through poorly-dubbed clips from sci-fi movie soundboards could've put forth a more emotive performance.

Best Film: Black Swan (2010)
Black Swan represents the almost always polarizing filmmaker Darren Aronofsky at his deranged best. His nightmarish direction along with Natalie Portman's astonishing performance in the lead role of obsessive ballet dancer Nina Sayers helped make this one of the most disturbing, mind-bending and unforgettable psychological thrillers I've ever had the pleasure of watching.

Worst Film: Jupiter Ascending (2015)
I strongly believe that it's harder to make a top-to-bottom failure than a perfect movie. Universal failures are almost unattainable when you consider that this an artform driven by creative individuals that are (presumably) better than anyone else in the world at their respective craft and investors that  have the financial clout to ensure that every title they produce looks and feels like a professional production. Jupiter Ascending is the most recent project that I've felt failed to meet this basic threshold for competence in the theatrically-released feature film industry and subsequently hit that rarely-achieved rock bottom for the artform. Every frame of this bloated, insufferably corny space opera is a potent case study of how not to act, write dialogue, tell a coherent story, stage an action scene, establish a pace or pretty much any other aspect of the process an instructor would address in a hypothetical "Filmmaking 101" course.   


Thank you for reading this week's edition of “The Best and Worst of”. The next victim of my praise and ire will be “The Meg” star Rainn Wilson.