Nearly every widely-reviewed bad film finds somebody who ought to
have known better recommending it. Based on quirks of individual taste
(e.g. genre biases, loyalty to source material, resonance with personal
experience), even terrible movies like Avatar: The Last Airbender
find a handful of critics who, in however qualified terms, nevertheless
endorse them. For this reason, RT scores of "zero" on films with more
than 20 or so reviews are exceedingly rare. This much is to be expected.
This list, conversely, documents a different phenomena: films that are given general, widespread critical assent despite sucking. These are trickier to explain, and so each film reviewed in this category will feature an attempt to do just that: work out what on earth everyone might have been thinking before awarding that fresh/thumbs up/three-star rating to something that should at best go to an unmarked grave.
This list works in no particular progressive order, nor does it attempt to be an "all-time" ranking. Item ten might be more overrated than item one, and, oh no, I most certainly do not know enough about film to claim that these are the "most" overrated ever. Hence, any comments are welcome to mention others, but these decisions are somewhat arbitrary and based on my own viewing history. My inclusions tend to focus on blockbusters, as these seem to draw the most unwarranted sympathy, but sleeper, indie, and foreign flicks can all be found in this category as well.
Without further ado...
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Tomatometer: 78%
South Park has already been all over this one, but it probably deserves one more kick before fading blessedly from memory. The best that can be said--and this is already stretching it--is that this is a good movie trapped inside a bad one. It's not hard to see what happened here: critics, desperate to see Harrison Ford don the whip and fedora one more time before shuffling off this mortal coil, focused on the one or two decent scenes in the film (say, the fun American Graffiti-esque rumble, to pick one of the few moments that works) and then ignored everything else, opting to view the onscreen result instead through the lens of the Aging Screen Legends Lifetime Achievement Award.
There's some justice to this, I suppose, because Ford is the best thing in the film, and director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp even wisely allow for his waning (albeit slowly) physical presence and charisma by writing his advancing age into the script. That the film sorta works as a meditation on age and loss is cool and all, but that is, of course, not why anybody came to see it.
But that's really about where Crystal Skull stops paying dividends. Shia LaBeouf as Indy's son and heir-apparent, Mutt Williams, is clueless, looking like he found his way onto the set by accident and leaving the audience unsure if he's the crown prince of a new franchise or an extra hiding in Ford's shadow (he leans toward the latter). The comic chemistry between Indy and Karen Allen's Marion Ravenwood from days of yore seems to have died back in the 80s, as their scenes together are off-key and mistimed, the dialogue, flat and stale as yesterday's lager, failing to inspire laughs. Supporting characters are either mute (a squandered John Hurt as Professor Oxley, Indy's old mentor), throwaway (Cate Blanchett's Natasha Fatale-inspired baddie Irina Spalko) or generally extraneous to the story (Ray Winstone as Mac McHale, Indy's traitorous sidekick).
But it gets worse. The charming 1930s serial quality, sped-up cameras and literal cliffhangers included, that executive producer George Lucas employed throughout the first three installments in the series has been "modernized." In practice, this means that the original aesthetic--one of the most likeable things about the series--has yielded to Lucas' deepening psychotic obsession, contracted during his endless revisions to the original Star Wars trilogy and refined during the woeful recent films, with replacing all of reality except his actors with computer generated graphics. So now, in the new-and-improved world of Crystal Skull, cars, gophers, ants, monkeys, and waterfalls--objects which occur in reality as we know it, and which can be and have been filmed--are now simply glowing objects in the shiny, transparently artificial sci-fi landscape that Lucas so clearly prefers over the demands of filming live objects.
The CGI approach stumbles on so many fronts: it obviates Ford's famed habit of doing his own stunts and thus allowing close-up filming of his actual reactions to dangerous situations, kills the campily retro vibe of the earlier films, and fails on its own terms, the alien spaceship effects looking like every other blockbuster in town, more leftovers from The Mummy III than anything unique to the Indiana Jones brand. And unlike the deliberately dated approach that, paradoxically, makes the earlier films timeless, the ill-advised entry into the blazingly fast CGI rat race means that the film already appears outmoded a mere five years later.
Is it a terrible film? No, not really. A little Harrison Ford, even the current model, goes a pretty long way. Should nearly four out of five critics have recommended it? Only if those were Lucas-generated as well.
This list, conversely, documents a different phenomena: films that are given general, widespread critical assent despite sucking. These are trickier to explain, and so each film reviewed in this category will feature an attempt to do just that: work out what on earth everyone might have been thinking before awarding that fresh/thumbs up/three-star rating to something that should at best go to an unmarked grave.
This list works in no particular progressive order, nor does it attempt to be an "all-time" ranking. Item ten might be more overrated than item one, and, oh no, I most certainly do not know enough about film to claim that these are the "most" overrated ever. Hence, any comments are welcome to mention others, but these decisions are somewhat arbitrary and based on my own viewing history. My inclusions tend to focus on blockbusters, as these seem to draw the most unwarranted sympathy, but sleeper, indie, and foreign flicks can all be found in this category as well.
Without further ado...
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)
Tomatometer: 78%
South Park has already been all over this one, but it probably deserves one more kick before fading blessedly from memory. The best that can be said--and this is already stretching it--is that this is a good movie trapped inside a bad one. It's not hard to see what happened here: critics, desperate to see Harrison Ford don the whip and fedora one more time before shuffling off this mortal coil, focused on the one or two decent scenes in the film (say, the fun American Graffiti-esque rumble, to pick one of the few moments that works) and then ignored everything else, opting to view the onscreen result instead through the lens of the Aging Screen Legends Lifetime Achievement Award.
There's some justice to this, I suppose, because Ford is the best thing in the film, and director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp even wisely allow for his waning (albeit slowly) physical presence and charisma by writing his advancing age into the script. That the film sorta works as a meditation on age and loss is cool and all, but that is, of course, not why anybody came to see it.
But that's really about where Crystal Skull stops paying dividends. Shia LaBeouf as Indy's son and heir-apparent, Mutt Williams, is clueless, looking like he found his way onto the set by accident and leaving the audience unsure if he's the crown prince of a new franchise or an extra hiding in Ford's shadow (he leans toward the latter). The comic chemistry between Indy and Karen Allen's Marion Ravenwood from days of yore seems to have died back in the 80s, as their scenes together are off-key and mistimed, the dialogue, flat and stale as yesterday's lager, failing to inspire laughs. Supporting characters are either mute (a squandered John Hurt as Professor Oxley, Indy's old mentor), throwaway (Cate Blanchett's Natasha Fatale-inspired baddie Irina Spalko) or generally extraneous to the story (Ray Winstone as Mac McHale, Indy's traitorous sidekick).
But it gets worse. The charming 1930s serial quality, sped-up cameras and literal cliffhangers included, that executive producer George Lucas employed throughout the first three installments in the series has been "modernized." In practice, this means that the original aesthetic--one of the most likeable things about the series--has yielded to Lucas' deepening psychotic obsession, contracted during his endless revisions to the original Star Wars trilogy and refined during the woeful recent films, with replacing all of reality except his actors with computer generated graphics. So now, in the new-and-improved world of Crystal Skull, cars, gophers, ants, monkeys, and waterfalls--objects which occur in reality as we know it, and which can be and have been filmed--are now simply glowing objects in the shiny, transparently artificial sci-fi landscape that Lucas so clearly prefers over the demands of filming live objects.
The CGI approach stumbles on so many fronts: it obviates Ford's famed habit of doing his own stunts and thus allowing close-up filming of his actual reactions to dangerous situations, kills the campily retro vibe of the earlier films, and fails on its own terms, the alien spaceship effects looking like every other blockbuster in town, more leftovers from The Mummy III than anything unique to the Indiana Jones brand. And unlike the deliberately dated approach that, paradoxically, makes the earlier films timeless, the ill-advised entry into the blazingly fast CGI rat race means that the film already appears outmoded a mere five years later.
Is it a terrible film? No, not really. A little Harrison Ford, even the current model, goes a pretty long way. Should nearly four out of five critics have recommended it? Only if those were Lucas-generated as well.
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