5 most overrated movies ever......


Ah such fun is being had on that other thread it's now time to take the axe to movies..........

1.Gladiator-for some reason "everybody" seemed to think there was some reason to feel emotional about this poor remake of Spartacus,the drawn-out revenge storyline trying vainly to add weight to little more than a CG generated WWF extravaganza,and the acting..oh dear..failed Aussie soap star Russell Crowe even won the oscar obviously Tom Hanks didn't make a movie that year...This films biggest crime is that it has the audacity to take itself seriously......watch it again in 5 years and wonder why you thought it was any good.
2.The Usual Suspects-with 20 minutes of this movie still to go I wanted to leave the cinema,who cared who Kaiser Sauzee was?
Off the back of Resevoir Dogs-a so-called hip movie that was all style over substance-absolute tosh,how very clever to have a script where the narrator lies to you,who cares if there were clues,who cared about any of these characters?, like a super-effective laxative launched a million movies with twist endings....
3.Blue Velvet--ah David Lynch-shocked us all with the fact that small town America had a dark side,didn't he watch the news?,read the newspapers,total junk,conceptual film-making without the concept,truly lazy nonsense,no script,only considered weird by those who like Lynch were ignored at school....unbelievably followed this up with worse movies with even more obvious points to make.
3.Platoon-some how at the time this was judged to be the movie that showed America had come to terms with the Viet Nam war..eh?
Hadn't anybody seen Coming Home,The Deer Hunter,Apocalypse Now,Bat 21?
All better movies made earlier,started Oliver Stone's trend to take serious subjects and condense them into nothing much to popular and critical acclaim.
Don't even start me on JFK.
Weren't the 80's crap.....
I don't care if he was in Viet Nam ,this movie is rubbish....
4.Braveheart-made me ashamed to be Scottish,historically inaccurate beyond belief,with an Australian playing a Scot,no doubt made ex-pats teary eyed the world over,made me cry with laughter
5.Anything with Tom Hanks-the modern day American everyman turns up everywhere,doomed space rockets,football pitches,WW2,you always know when he's in a movie that it will be sentimental populist tosh-Saving Private Ryan was great till he turned up signalling the end of any realism...oh and those Oscar speeches.............

Fire away fellow Audiogon Movie fans.........
ben_campbell

Showing 4 responses by ozfly

Hey, I loved Memento; to Unsounds' point though, I am very empathetic to it since my memory ain't what it used to be. I'm sorry, what was I saying?
The Mexican -- worst movie of all time. I so wanted the main characters to die and put us out of our misery. The best character was the hit man, who was killed. Sigh ... This may not be considered as overrated since most reviewers didn't give it many stars -- but even one is too many.

Armageddon -- how many feet exactly did they have to drill? And they determined that from how far away? Just one example of the really crappy science -- pet peeve that science fiction should have some science in it (unless it's camp)

Terms of Endearment -- like the Mexican, "just die already". Acting was great but story was blase, trying way too hard and derivative, which leads to ...

Star Wars 1 & 2 where the acting was horrible and the story was well, not exactly creative. Yes, the special effects were great, but a little teensy bit of acting would have helped.

Titanic -- overrated even beyond Gladiator. But then again, I'm not a teenage girl and that was their target audience and the group who kept the movie afloat, at least financially. The movie was better than the Poseidon Adventure and a host of other disaster films, but the operative word for all of these is disaster.

Great post Ben. I'm generally with you on Tom Hanks too -- nice movies, but hardly up to the hype and glory (though I did enjoy Splash and Big).
Kirk, there are many, many greats! Out of my top 30 or so, Casablanca, Citizin Kane (saw it in high school and it made one heck of an impression on me), Godfather, Napolean (Russian two part film -- 180,000 soviet troops were used!), Little Big Man, Unforgiven (derivative, but still so good), Pulp Fiction. It goes on. A couple of recent ones I greatly enjoyed are Bread and Tulips and Memento (see comments above).
I can't recall -- did anyone mention Moulin Rouge as greatly overrated? What do you think of that movie?
This is great! Many of the movies mentioned are ones that someone loves and someone else hates. Wouldn't it be great to be a movie critic? One of the reasons I love this site is that there can be extreme, healthy disagreement without it getting personal (well, most of the time).
Treyhoss, I forgot about Last Emperor -- there's a movie that deserves to be on the overrated list. It needed serious editing work to patch all the holes in it. Bbtuna, I am also a big Tolkien fan and really enjoyed the movie, which was quite true to the book -- again one of those love it or hate it flicks.