Sam Eagers  really doesn’t get the hype surrounding Christian Bale. At all.

“Bale had been cast as the title role, only to be overshadowed by someone who is, in my opinion, a great deal more competent..”

I have found a substitute to the expression ‘watching paint dry’. ‘Watching Christian Bale act’ will become a byword for wasting your life.  My disregard for him runs deeper than just being a truly awful actor. You see, Christian Bale has led me to beg for forgiveness on more than one occasion.

 Over the summer I watched a couple of films that were so awful, that I felt compelled to apologize to my friends for wasting two hours of their lives. My choosing of the film made it my responsibility, even though it was the fault of the actors and director that ruined everybody’s life. The main feature of all these films was of course Christian Bale. 

Now, Batman was a great film, but this was only because Heath Ledger played a blinder as the joker. In fact, in both ‘Terminator Salvation’ and ‘The Dark Knight’ Bale had been cast as the title role, only to be overshadowed by someone who is, in my opinion, a great deal more competent. As John Connor, leader of the resistance, the entire reason for the last three Terminator films, I was honestly hoping that he was going to die instead of the half-and-half terminator. Maybe the casting director mixed up the scripts when he gave it to the actors because a machine that feels no emotion is perhaps Bale’s true calling. 

I may be in the minority on this however. Although I haven’t seen these films, Christian Bale was reviewed very well in ‘American Psycho’ (despite one reviewer calling the film overall as a “stillborn, pointless piece of work”) and ‘The Prestige’, where he apparently gave a stunning performance as a man wrongly accused of murder. Directors and critics must have enjoyed his acting enough to have cast him in these summer blockbuster films originally, but I will always harbour a personal hatred for the man.

 In my view, on top of being a terrible actor, he seems to be portrayed fairly consistantly as a terrible person. I think everyone found his rant at the sound technician to be hilarious whilst at the same time completely unacceptable. Christian Bale launched a verbal tirade that would only be  justifiable had the soundman committed some heinous crime against mankind. Clearly therefore, he can exhibit emotion in real life – making his inability to depict any on-screen all the more impressive. If he could exhibit these emotions in his acting, then he could become more versatile and greatly improve his cinematic performances, but until then, he will continue to be- to me, at least- no more than an emotionless vegetable mistaken in an actors clothing. Hopefully people will wake up to the incompetence of Bale, so I can stop apologizing to my friends…for bad films.

Sam Eagers