Doing it wrong: 11 deeply unsexy sex scenes

The ’90s were apparently so starved for leading men that Billy Baldwin managed to make this list twice—in sex scenes with two of the beauties of the decade, Cindy Crawford and Sharon Stone. Fair Game was Crawford’s first and last leading role, a generic thriller in which she’s a lawyer on the run and Baldwin is a cop protecting her from some murderous, money-laundering Russians. Their inevitable sex scene is almost a relief, as it’s one of the few sequences that doesn’t involve any gratuitous bloody gunshots (well, not at first), explosions, or car crashes. It does, however, take place in a filthy, grimy freight car, where day turns suddenly into night and the light through the slats makes the tryst resemble a Berlin video. Even if you can get past the fact that these two are having sex in a place where you wouldn’t give your dog a bath, there’s the fact that the scene ends with the two getting interrupted by one of the Russians, who Crawford then shoots with Baldwin’s gun mid-coitus. Worse still, somehow, is Sliver, in which Baldwin plays a creepy rich voyeur (and Christian Grey precursor) surveying Stone in her apartment in the ugliest high-rise in New York City. Of the movie’s many sex scenes (elevators, bathtubs, up against a pillar), the first one is the worst, with Stone coming across like Bambi on the ice. She never looks anything but startled and highly uncomfortable (likely because the two leads reportedly hated each other) so the film only showcases screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’ worst voyeuristic tendencies. From gritty cop to slimy mogul, ’90s Billy Baldwin was always game to drop his trousers at a moment’s notice, but the resulting seductions were only laughable. [Gwen Ihnat]

Dramatizing the retaliatory, black-ops aftermath of the terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics, Munich is a high-water mark of Steven Spielberg’s post-millennial output: a tense political thriller tucked into a moral study on cycles of violence and the spiritual toll of revenge. It also features a very silly, very overwrought sex scene. Late in the film, Mossad agent Avner (Eric Bana), roiling with guilt and disillusionment, makes sad, tortured love to his wife (Ayelet Zurer). Crosscutting between his methodical gyrations and previously withheld images of the Israeli athletes being executed on a German tarmac—the horrors that haunt this soldier’s mind, even when he’s trying to get his rocks off—Spielberg outrageously cranks up the melodrama; as mournful music swells on the soundtrack, Bana makes anguished orgasm faces and throws his head back in slow motion, splashing what looks like gallons of sweat all over the room. It’s a bad climax in every sense of the word—and especially unflattering in comparison to an earlier sex scene it’s deliberately contrasting: a tryst between Avner and his wife that counts as one of the most genuinely carnal, even sexy moments of Spielberg’s career. [A.A. Dowd]

Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has been rendered cliché through rampant overuse, a beautiful song whose impact has been unfairly dulled through countless American Idol contestants, Michael Bolton covers, and . That makes Zack Snyder’s choice to use it in Watchmen anyway, though certainly on-brand, all the more baffling. Cohen’s ode to the intermingling of godly love and secular pleasures creepily soundtracks the film’s central sex scene between Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson) and Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), with Cohen’s gravelly voice, lifted by a gospel choir, giving their latex-covered grinding aboard a floating, owl-shaped dirigible a ring of churchly solemnity that’s possibly sincere, possibly ironic, and altogether distracting. It’s a toss-up as to whether the scene—which climaxes, literally, with Akerman pressing a button to shoot an orgasmic ejaculation of fire out of their space-owl—might have been sexier with a different song, one without an emotional weight that two superheroes humping couldn’t possibly carry. As it stands, their rutting is overshadowed by the sweaty, awkward clusterfuck of competing tones. [Sean O’Neal]

“They just laid there,” is a pretty common refrain when describing an unsatisfying, awkward, or otherwise forgettable sexual experience. Given that the overall apathy level of Michael Fassbender’s performance in The Snowman falls somewhere between “teenager forced to attend family party” and “sloth suffering from clinical depression,” perhaps it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that he fails to show much enthusiasm when he and Charlotte Gainsbourg, playing recently reunited exes, hook up toward the end of the film. Fassbender lies on his back, palms flat on the floor, throughout the scene, leaving Gainsbourg to do all the work. Can you blame her, then, for her similarly soporific response, slowly straddling him and just sort of perching there for a little while? [Katie Rife]

Steven Seagal, and Grand Poo-bah of direct-to-video shit, has turned lazy D-list diva behavior into a surreal art form. Year after year, he cranks out indistinguishable cheapies that rarely require him to do much more than sit behind a table and wheezily mumble semi-improvised dialogue like a knock-off Marlon Brando, with hilariously unconvincing green screen effects and body doubles employed for damn near everything else. Far removed from his 1990s heyday, he no longer fights or runs on camera, yet continues to make action movies. But he still does his own deeply unerotic sex scenes. The lap-dance-based script of Seagal’s lovemaking has remained more or less unchanged since Into The Sun, made back when the star still did most of his own standing. A decades-younger, lingerie-model-looking romantic interest takes her top off in front of a seated and fully clothed Seagal (in more recent films like End Of A Gun and , he also keeps his sunglasses on); his hands hover on her back and shoulders; sex is implied via awkward hugs and slow, froggish kissing; everyone (camera included) appears deeply uncomfortable. Seagal’s is the baldest of all power-trip oeuvres, pushing vanity to the edge of representation. His heroes are invariably introduced as martial-expert-slash-ex-federal-agent Casanovas, but what we see is a man in his mid-60s with badly dyed hair, covered in a loose black bag of clothing. Bad guys meet gruesome fates from his stiff kicks and chops and beautiful women can’t resist his clumsy, nonsexual touching. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]