10 Famous Actors Who Only Ever Managed One Legitimately Great Performance

10) Vin Diesel In Find Me Guilty

Vin Diesel has been doing his humorless hard-man schtick for years. No matter if the movie’s big (the Fast and Furious films) or relatively small (Riddick), Diesel just seems to get lost as a prop who’s present simply to facilitate the explosive action. Not so in Find Me Guilty, though, a blackly comic courtroom drama and the great Sidney Lumet’s penultimate movie.

Find Me Guilty got buried at the box office upon release in 2006, but not for lack of Diesel trying. Roger Ebert called Diesel’s performance – as a lunk-headed Mafioso jailbird representing himself in trial – “remarkable.”

Here, the actor is everything he’s not in any of his other movies: vulnerable, convincingly capable of emotion and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny.