On the face of it, Naomi Watts is probably one of the least offensive actors out there. She's kind of like a cheap version of Nicole Kidman (actually, they're good friends in reality) only a bit less frosty. She's sort of inoffensively good looking, doesn't do much that the tabloids are interested in, and generally comes off kind of, dare I say it... boring?

Oddly enough, she was in one film that I count among my all-time favourites (I Heart Huckabees - and I know, I'm in the minority on that one!) but that's not enough to save her from the ruthlessness of the Den of Geek dartboard...

Dart One: (1 point)
The Ring seems like a good place to start. It's hard to blame her for this movie, but on the other hand, it's where I first started to realise I wasn't going to like anything she was in. A weird remake of a scary movie, there are some really scary moments in The Ring, but it also looks like it's being filmed underwater thanks to the ever-present green filter, and I just failed to sympathise with her character. Something about her was just... irritating. Call it a red flag, or some kind of premonition...

Dart Two: (61 points)
Can anyone come up with a more boring, pretentious trio of movies than 21 Grams, We Don't Live Here Anymore and The Assassination of Richard Nixon? If you actually watched all of those in sequence, you'd end up in a coma or something. Watts seems to have turned into a blank, whiny, pointless presence, to the point where just seeing her face brings me out in hives.

Dart Three: (121 points)
The previous darts may have been for some minor indiscretions - the second dart buoyed up on a series of films that all sucked beyond belief - but here's the crux of the matter.

The Ring Two.

That film is the very definition of worthless dross, and Watts has turned irredeemably into ... I don't even know what, but I never want to see it again. I wish I'd had the forsight to count the number of times she says "honey" in this movie (much like the way I used to tally the verbal tics of certain lecturers at university...) because it feels like she uses it in the place of punctuation. Honey, honey, honey; the word loses all meaning and starts to just become an irritation.

And then there's the infamous "I'm not your fucking mommy!" line. Sure, she didn't write it, but bugger me if she didn't deliver it like the hammiest ham that ever, um, hammed.

Writing this has brought it home to me that there's no real reason Naomi Watts creeps me out. She's very similar to Heath Ledger in that I just know her presence means bad things. Ledger is a complete waste of film space, too (I'm scared for The Dark Knight for that very reason) and according to the IMDB, the two used to date.

Now there's a thought to keep me up at night.

Previous Den of Geek dartboard victims: Leigh Whannell, Len Wiseman, Kevin Smith, Takashi Shimizu, Paul W. S. Anderson, Zack Snyder..