These 15 Overrated Movies Are Actually Lame
Sometimes, the passage of time and distance from the hype, awards, and buzz surrounding certain movies reveals the cold, brutal truth some of us already knew: these overrated films are kind of lame.
Maybe they had genius marketing teams, the lead actors had a lot of heat, or the timing of the films’ releases connected with something happening in the world at that date, generating more buzz and attention than the movies deserved.
No matter what the reason the following overrated movies received accolades, awards, and box office dollars, it’s time to look behind the curtain, expose the true Wizard of Oz, and ponder why movies this lame infiltrated the collective consciousness as “cinematic greatness.”
Titanic (1997)
James Cameron’s epic disaster film about the sinking of the Titanic stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as passengers from two different social classes who meet and fall in love on the doomed ship that sank in the Atlantic Ocean in 1912. Titanic won 11 Oscars, broke box office records, and became the favorite childhood movie of many millennials.
No one can take away Cameron’s attention to detail regarding the ship and costumes, plus the special effects depicting the Titanic‘s sinking remain impressive to this day. However, the true story of the Titanic had so much drama already. Why shoehorn in a fictitious love story featuring a late-’90s teen heartthrob to pad the run time to 195 minutes? Oh, that’s right — to sell lots of tickets to teen girls who saw the movie repeatedly and teared up every time they heard the overwrought Celine Dion ballad “My Heart Will Go On.”
From a business perspective, Cameron is a genius. Those wanting to learn something meaningful about the more than 1,500 actual passengers who died in the Titanic disaster were left in the cold…like DiCaprio at the end of the movie.
La La Land (2016)
Ryan Gosling plays a struggling jazz pianist who falls in love with an aspiring actress played by Emma Stone in Damien Chazelle’s musical romance La La Land. The movie won six Oscars, including Best Director and Best Actress.
The Academy loves doling out awards to movies — especially musicals — about Hollywood and the movie industry, so it should surprise no one that La La Land received a record-tying 14 Oscar nominations. Is the simplistic story with charming leads really on par with All About Eve, the first film to receive 14 Oscar nominations? Not even close…
Crash (2004)
Paul Haggis’ crime drama Crash — not to be confused with David Cronenberg’s superior movie of the same name — features a huge ensemble cast, including Sandra Bullock, Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Jennifer Esposito, Brendan Fraser, Terrence Howard, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Thandiwe Newton, and Ryan Phillippe. The movie won three Oscars, including Best Picture, and people still complain about it.
Crash‘s heavy-handed and black-and-white depiction of race issues in Los Angeles turned off many viewers. Years before the word “woke” became commonplace, Crash attempted to start a conversation about race. The Academy appreciated the effort and politely pushed a few Oscars its way; everyone else thought the movie missed the mark by miles.
Bird Box (2018)
In the postapocalyptic horror-thriller Bird Box directed by Susanne Bier, Sandra Bullock plays a woman trying to protect herself and two children from mysterious entities that, when looked upon, drive people to take their own lives. Bird Box became the most-watched movie on Netflix within a month of its release and spawned the god-awful sequel Bird Box Barcelona.
Although Bird Box became a hit for Netflix and generated a lot of fun memes featuring a blindfolded Bullock, the derivative movie owes a lot to better horror films such as A Quiet Place6. In the latter, which came out several months before Bird Box, people have to tiptoe around to avoid hostile aliens who respond to sound. In Bird Box, people make all the noise they want but have to walk around blindfolded to avoid hostile entities of indeterminate origin. In every respect, A Quiet Place delivers the goods better.
The Marvels (2023)
Nia DaCosta’s The Marvels is the 33rd film in the bloated Marvel Cinematic Universe and a direct sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel. The Marvels, starring Oscar winner Brie Larson as Captain Marvel, received a lot of hype prior to its release for having a female-centric cast and a female director who received praise for her Candyman requel.
The Marvels became the lowest-grossing MCU movie — one of the few to not break even during its theatrical run. Part of the blame is superhero fatigue, which DaCosta has acknowledged is a real problem in interviews.
As the MCU plods along and adds more interconnected movies and TV series to its “universe,” casual moviegoers have also started turning away from certain lesser-known superhero flicks. No one wants to watch 32 other movies and a few Disney+ series as “homework” to prepare themselves to spend a few hours with The Marvels in a theater.
The Notebook (2004)
The Notebook adapts a romance novel by Nicholas Sparks — a man who has made a lucrative career out of penning sappy romantic fantasies for a largely female audience. The Notebook takes place in the 1940s and stars Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams. The box office hit won several awards, including the prestigious MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss.
Sentimental romance stories feel manipulative in the way they try to give one “the feels,” and The Notebook is guilty as charged. Behind the scenes, Gosling and McAdams clashed, so it’s a testament to both actors’ acting abilities that moviegoers felt they had chemistry and believed in the predictable story anyway.
Twilight (2008)
For a few years, young adult movies were all the rage. Twilight arrived at just the right moment to capitalize on that as well as the popularity of vampires in movies, TV shows, and books.
Based on a novel by Stephenie Meyer, Twilight explored the burgeoning love triangle between a sullen human teen (Kristen Stewart) and two supernatural hotties: a sparkly vampire (Robert Pattinson) and a hunky werewolf (Taylor Lautner). The blockbuster hit spawned The Twilight Saga franchise, consisting of five movies.
Looking back on the young adult movies from the aughts and early 2010s, most have not aged well, especially Twilight. The latter isn’t scary enough for horror fans, and wondering which supernatural stud the heroine will pick is not a compelling story for most adults — certainly not if it takes five movies to find out.
Stewart and Pattinson had an offscreen romance that lasted most of the duration of The Twilight Saga, which fans became more interested in than the movies. When they split in real life, the spell these movies had over young adults also got broken.
Justice League (2017)
Zack Snyder’s Justice League is the fifth movie in the now-defunct DCEU. The superhero team-up featuring Superman (Henry Cavill), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), the Flash (Ezra Miller) and other DCEU characters was supposed to represent DC’s answer to The Avengers. Due to a problematic production and increasing superhero fatigue, the expensive movie bombed in theaters. In 2021, a much-longer director’s cut titled Zack Snyder’s Justice League debuted on HBO Max in response to fan demand.
Although the director’s cut adds more meat to the story, neither version is a satisfying meal. There is a lot going on at once in Justice League but precious little for viewers to care about. Even if one enjoys superhero movies for special effects, Justice League seems more like a video game than something that was shot in a real setting with a natural background. If the movie looked more grounded in reality or shot somewhere that looked like a real place, maybe viewers wouldn’t have gotten lost in green screen after green screen.
Tenet (2020)
Oscar-winner Christopher Nolan wrote and directed this sci-fi action thriller starring John David Washington. The plot involves a secret organization tracing the origin of objects traveling backward in time because they relate to a future attack. The divisive movie won the Best Visual Effects Oscar.
Maybe the pandemic also explains why a convoluted, pretentious, and hopelessly obtuse movie such as Tenet won an Oscar. The cast looks as lost as those in the audience who tried to makes sense of it when it came out during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Poor Things (2023)
Director Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, and Willem Dafoe, tells a story about a woman named Bella in Victorian London who dies and is brought back to life by implanting the brain of her unborn fetus into her head.
With the mind of a child, wide-eyed Bella is all id — she rants, raves, break things, speaks in baby language, and touches everything. This includes her own body as she explores herself sexually, but also the adult men in her life. The movie won four Oscars, including Best Actress for Stone.
Critics and those who dole out awards heaped praise on Stone for her brave performance. Yes, her character’s rapid progression from a child-woman to a brothel worker is impressive from an acting perspective, but does the movie actually want to celebrate? Instead of the men in the movie viewing Bella as a medical curiosity or some kind of freak of nature, they instead are turned on by Bella’s sexual naivety. She talks dirty — in an innocent, childlike fashion — because she essentially IS a child.
Poor Things won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy. Although most people would flinch in horror if a movie depicted a fifty-something man taking a child on a cruise for uninterrupted sexual escapades, apparently it’s a real knee-slapper if you take that same child’s brain and put it in the body of Emma Stone. There is nothing lamer than passing off thinly disguised child sexual abuse as comedy and accepting awards for doing so. Nothing.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project didn’t invent the found-footage genre, but it might as well have. The supernatural horror film is about three student filmmakers who disappeared in the woods while filming a documentary about the Blair Witch in the Black Hills near Burkittsville, Maryland.
The brilliant marketing campaign for The Blair Witch Project led many to believe that the footage was authentic and that the three student filmmakers were actually missing people. Shot for under $1 million, The Blair Witch Project made over $248 million and spawned two sequels as well as countless imitators.
Decades later, now that we know that Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard are just actors and not missing, The Blair Witch Project seems pretty lame as a horror film. The film is poorly shot for a realistic found-footage vibe, and nothing much happens besides people bumbling around in the woods until the final few minutes of the gimmicky movie.
Forrest Gump (1994)
Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump stars Tom Hanks as the titular character — a simple Alabama man through whose eyes we view various important historical events during the 20th century. The blockbuster hit won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Director.
This overly sentimental and simplistic view of American life elicits more jeers than cheers when viewed 30 years later. Inserting the Gump character into a talk show beside President Nixon in the movie feels weird and unbelievable, not to mention unrelatable for today’s younger generations. Life may be like a box of chocolates for Forrest Gump, but this manipulative movie is a box of lame ideas.
Shakespeare in Love (1998)
This period rom-com directed by John Madden explores a fictional love affair between William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes) and Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) as the former was writing Romeo and Juliet. The box office hit somehow won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actress.
The same critics who heaped praise on this silly love story expressed outrage when the Academy gave Shakespeare in Love its biggest awards instead of Steven Spielberg’s heavy wartime drama Saving Private Ryan. In subsequent years, the Academy shied away from awarding comedies and light entertainment major Oscars.
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
Baz Luhrmann directed, produced and co-wrote this jukebox musical starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor. Moulin Rouge! became a commercial success and won two Oscars: Best Production Design and Best Costume Design.
With Luhrmann, audiences know what to expect in a movie: garish sets and costumes, bombastic music numbers, and exaggerated acting dialed up to 11. Nothing is subtle in a Luhrmann picture such as Moulin Rouge! — even a should-be-subtle glance from Kidman or a raised eyebrow comes punctuated with an exclamation point…or five.
Many moviegoers have a knee-jerk negative reaction to musicals, which may explain why recent musicals such as Wonka and Mean Girls had trailers that downplayed or outright hid the fact that they were musicals. Luhrmann’s movies, including Moulin Rouge!, are refreshingly honest about what they are. For those who think musicals are lame, Moulin Rouge! won’t change your mind.
Frozen (2013)
The animated musical fantasy Frozen tells the story of two estranged sisters, Anna and Elsa. The latter’s icy magical powers have trapped their kingdom in a perpetual winter. The box office sensation features the voices of Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, Jonathan Groff, Josh Gad, and Santino Fontana. Frozen won two Oscars: Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song.
Although young girls love the Frozen Disney princesses and, unlike the rest of humanity, can’t get enough of the song “Let It Go,” can we agree that this simplistic, almost babyish Disney film aims very young? We’re talking single-digit ages here, folks.
It’s OK for kids under 10 to find meaning here or the parent of a wee one to just deeply appreciate something distracting kids for a magical, uninterrupted 102 minutes. For the rest of us, Frozen still gets the cold shoulder.
