Famke Janssen is one of Hollywood's true unsung heroes. She has been in blockbuster action movies, critically acclaimed dramas, and teen horror favorites. On top of her film career, Janssen has also starred in prominent TV series like Hemlock Grove and How to Get Away with Murder.
Now, the best (and worst) films of her decades-long career have been ranked, according to review aggregate Rotten Tomatoes.
Janssen has two films that have received a rating of 71% on Rotten Tomatoes. The first is Made, a movie about a blue-collar family who gets caught up with the mob. The film also starred Vince Vaughn.
The other was The Wolverine, the 2013 spinoff from the X-Men series, which saw Logan make his way to Japan to try and resolve old debts. The movie was a massive success, earning over $414 million at the box office.
At the start of The Show, the finale of a reality series goes horribly wrong when one of the contestants commits a murder/suicide. However, the network realizes that death brings in viewers and decides to create a reality show where people commit suicide in front of a live studio audience.
Critics were disappointed that the movie didn't make a clear enough point. Was it a satire of how far media will go for ratings? Or was it a philosophical comment on respecting life? Nobody could tell.
GoldenEye is consistently hailed as one of the best Bond films ever, not to mention it's the movie that helped launch Janssen to international fame. In the movie, she plays Xenia Onatopp, a seductive killer who gets sexual pleasure from murdering men.
The film, which launched the wildly popular N64 game of the same name, went on to earn $355 million at the box office, and the game became one of the best-selling titles in Nintendo history.
Hide and Seek was supposed to be the thriller of the year. It had a talented cast, including Robert De Niro, and was highly publicized before its release. The movie was a sort-of thriller/horror that pulled a Fight Club and revealed that De Niro was the bad guy the whole time.
Unfortunately, the movie was slow, clunky, contradictory, and just plain uninteresting. The BBC gave a particularly harsh review, stating, "De Niro continues his long slide into mediocrity with yet another charmless psycho-thriller."
When X-Men was released in 2000, few people knew it was about to open the floodgates for not just the rebirth of superhero movies, but a cultural phenomenon that would captivate audiences of all ages and produce some of the highest-grossing movies in cinematic history.
X-Men was a hit both with critics and audiences alike, gaining almost $300 million in ticket sales. In the film, Janssen plays the role of Jean Grey, one of Marvel's strongest superheroes.
Although Taken was a huge hit when it came out in 2009, by the third movie, audiences began asking ... How many times can someone from this family get kidnapped?
Though the film was a massive box office success, critics couldn't help but pan the movie for being another regurgitated incarnation of the original, with ABC News saying, "Taken 3 may be this movie's title, but the only thing taken here will be your money ..."
In a review, the Associated Press stated, "X-Men works because it isn't about the effects. It's really about being different (in this case, a mutant)." And this statement is incredibly true. The X-Men movies have always been popular because of the talented cast, unique characters, and the stories of accepting yourself.
The franchise has long been a favorite of marginalized groups, like the LGBTQ+ community and people with disabilities. The series has even spawned tons of scholarly articles that use X-Men characters as a representation of oppression, self-acceptance, and diversity.
Circus deserves some credit for at least titling itself accurately. The movie is a total circus and not in a good way. It centers around two crooks (Famke Janssen and John Hannah). One wants to get out of the business, the other wants to stay in. Then there's an opportunity to run a casino, but there's someone who wants them dead, and there's also someone who wants them to kill someone else ...
Certainly, the movie was trying to be a funny runaround with numerous plots going on at once, but in the end, it fell flat because too much was going on and very little made any sense.
Monument Ave. centers around the gritty Irish underbelly of Boston. The plot focuses on the Irish mafia and their notorious 'code of silence', which dictated that you couldn't talk about what goes on between you and the mob.
In the film, one man is forced to question this code when members of his family start getting murdered. Critics loved the film and praised the powerful performances of Janssen, along with co-stars Denis Leary and Martin Sheen.
The Poison Rose deserves credit where credit is due ... getting a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes isn't the easiest task in the world. Furthermore, it's low rating is shocking, considering the cast is filled with A-List names, including Morgan Freeman, John Travolta, Brendan Fraser, and Robert Patrick, along with Janssen.
The plot follows a detective as he searches for a missing person. Unfortunately, the gritty crime drama came off as more of a desperate attempt, with Variety calling it, "An astonishingly listless neo-noir wannabe ..."
