Morgan Freeman's Two Worst Movies According To Rotten Tomatoes

Morgan Freeman is surely one of the most recognizable actors working today — and work he does. While the man has an Oscar to his name and several truly memorable roles in his filmography, that filmography is ... extensive. Freeman churns out movies at about the same rate as, shall we say, Samuel L. Jackson or John Travolta, often lending his significant talent to projects other stars of his caliber wouldn't even consider.

That's not to knock the now 87-year-old, either. Often Freeman elevates these lesser titles simply by being a part of them. But there are a few movies that even the great Morgan Freeman can't save. Yes, for every "Million Dollar Baby" or "Shawshank Redemption" there's a truly bewildering stinker in the Freeman oeuvre that simply couldn't be rescued by the man's gravitas. 2014's "Transcendence," for instance, currently sports a shameful 19% on Rotten Tomatoes, while the "Has Fallen" trilogy can't seem to get a score above 50% on the review aggregator — let's hope the fourth "Has Fallen" film, which is still said to be in the works, fares better.

Now, allow me to take you on a perilous journey to an even deeper level of the Freeman iceberg, where we'll discover movies so bad that even with the esteemed actor involved they couldn't nudge the Tomatometer past the wretched 0% mark.

What Morgan Freeman films could possibly be so bad they didn't get one positive review? Well, a couple, as it happens. But fear not, neither are particularly well known, so Rotten Tomatoes isn't about to besmirch a hidden Freeman gem. That said, both these films have fallen afoul of the Tomatometer and currently sport 0% ratings on the website.

The first movie on our list is 2006's "The Contract" in which Freeman starred as assassin Frank Carden. The film also stars John Cusack as ex-cop Ray Keene, who unwittingly gets caught up in Frank's dark underworld. Unfortunately, neither Freeman nor Cusack could do much for this direct-to-video effort, which failed to garner one positive review — though it should be noted that the film only has six reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

Often when there are fewer reviews for a title, you're much more likely to get either a 0 or 100% rating, simply by virtue of the way Rotten Tomatoes works. In this instance, 0% just means none of the six critics that reviewed "The Contract" liked it. Had more reviews been collected, you can bet that percentage would have gone up — even if only slightly. Still, this action thriller from director Bruce Beresford really didn't go down well with the six people who did provide their assessments, with one in particular going so far as to describe "The Contract" as "Little more than a clumsy pile-up of hackneyed themes, one-dimensional characters, and mediocre tension." Suffice it to say that Frank Carden will not go down as one of Morgan Freeman's best roles.

"The Contract" wasn't exactly Morgan Freeman's finest moment. But there is another movie that has fared even worse. How can you get worse than nothing? By having more reviews and still managing to keep the Tomatometer at 0%.

For this feat, Freeman had to team up with a man who knows a little bit about 0% ratings. I write, of course, about John Travolta, who currently has seven movies with 0% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes — one of which also starred Morgan Freeman. Yes, 2019's "The Poison Rose" is our other Freeman dud, and saw the Oscar-winner team up with his equally prolific buddy for a movie that Variety called "An astonishingly listless neo-noir wannabe."

In George Gallo's thriller, Travolta plays hard drinkin' private detective Carson Phillips, who returns to his Texas hometown to investigate a missing persons case. It's there that he encounters mob kingpin Doc, played by Freeman in what the Los Angeles Times called a "solid supporting performance." Unfortunately, that's about the best thing critics said about the movie, which, in the same review, was characterized by the Times as "just ... well, sad." The other ten reviews collected for this film weren't much better, either.

Both "The Contract" and "The Poison Rose," with their 0% ratings, sit at the bottom of Rotten Tomatoes' ranking of Morgan Freeman films — just behind another unseen stinker in the form of "Just Getting Started" and its 4% rating. But it should be said that Rotten Tomatoes is far from the final word on movie criticism. Aside from the fact these particular films have very few reviews to count in the first place, the site's whole rating system is questionable at best.

The most obvious way to illustrate this point is that Rotten Tomatoes would have you believe that there are only two perfect sci-fi movies in the history of cinema, and that Alfred Hitchcock made just two perfect films in 1943's "Shadow of a Doubt" and 1937's "Young and Innocent." But a slightly more in-depth assessment would point out that the RT percentages are made up of reviews that are deemed either positive or negative, reducing all critical nuance to a binary. What's more, this forces the RT curators to shoehorn reviews that don't fit that mold into barely coherent categories, described by the website itself as either "mixed-positive" or "mixed-negative."

So, take heart Morgan Freeman fans. These ratings should not be taken all that seriously, especially since the more informative "average rating" scores for both "The Contract" and "The Poison Rose" are higher than zero. The former managed a 3.9 rating out of 10 and the latter a 2.9 out of 10. That ain't great, but it ain't zero. Still, I'd imagine these are two entries in his filmography Morgan Freeman would rather forget than defend, so let's join him in that endeavor.