Critically Praised Movies you Hated

[Noah]

I have a friend who feels the exact same way(I may have even mentioned him on here)but he says he normally gets shouted down whenever he dares be critical of the Nolan movies.

Personally, I like both series for what they are and the spin they put on the mythos.

[RPS]

Nolan is a great director, I just personally seem to detest everything he does. I'll give him props in being able to come up with some pretty original and high-minded concepts, I just think they are personally worth an eye-roll rather than applause and, in my opinion, he rarely pulls them off very well. I understand the direction he wanted to go with Batman and kudos... just to me, I think there is something much more interesting in Batman when he is a bit camp and over the top. It is probably why I enjoyed something like the Avengers far more than I've enjoyed the Nolan series.

[Nick Adams]

Has anyone brought up Avatar yet? Fucking hated that film.

I would have, but then I realized I didn't so much hate it as find it unoriginal and predictable. Dances With Wolves meets Zulu Dawn, but on another planet. With tall blue people. Doesn't deserve the praise it got, but I can at least understand why others liked it.

The "technologically advanced society seeks to fuck over a peaceful, less-advanced society on another planet because of its resources" thing had already been done, too. It is called Star Trek: Insurrection, and it is the only odd-numbered Trek movie from the original ten-movie run that didn't outright suck. Unfortunately, this was because the sucking was equally shared between Insurrection and Nemesis.

The LOTR trilogy is good fun, but Return of the King in no way deserved all the awards it got.

[VerbalPuke]

Requiem For a Dream is the first and only time I've ever stopped watching a movie I rented/Netflixed out of sheer contempt and disgust. It just felt like misery porn.

Magnolia is super-overrated too, which is sad because I love basically everyone involved in the making of it except maybe Tom Cruise, and he's probably the best part.

That it makes no sense to the point where even the writer admits it makes no sense on the commentary.

Agreed on both, did not care for Requiem For a Dream or Donnie Darko.

Sadly, Deliverance is on this list for me. I thought I'd enjoy this one, the soundtrack is fucking amazing, it has a nice cast, but the movie just wasn't that interesting. "Guys go camping, one guy dies, guy gets raped by rednecks, guys kill rednecks, guys flee, and done." I kept waiting for something interesting to happen after Burt Reynolds does his thing with the bow and arrow, but the movie just stalls and never goes anywhere after that.

[zero]

Time has not been kind to Avatar, but people seemed to love it at the time. It is awful though.

[GoGo Yubari]

Yeah, I don't count Avatar because the backlash has been pretty notable. Same reason why I don't count Crash.

[LL!]

I'd say it still counts considering they wanna shove three more down our throats. I can see your argument that Crash may not count, though.

[Benjamin]

I can at least understand the reasoning behind why people dislike some of the films mentioned here, but The Prestige too? Boggles my mind.

[GoGo Yubari]

I'd say it still counts considering they wanna shove three more down our throats.

By that logic we should also all be talking about our dislike of critically praised movie Transformers, though.

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

Someone (Quom?) hated The Machinist. That's sad. I like that film very much. A very good, brooding atmosphere hangs over it.

[9 to 5]

Maybe it's just because I haven't had the displeasure of coming across any Fight Club superfans

I envy you. My ex put me off it so much that I almost get physicially ill when I see it on TV.

[reyrey619]

Mystic River. I guess if you like ridiculous overacting, then this is for you.

The Ides of March. Just as I was getting interested, it ended.

Dances With Wolves. I really dislike Costner and this movie felt like it was 5 hours long. It was actually 3, was is too long as it is.

Prometheus. I didn't hate it, but it was the biggest disappointment in years.

[LL!]

I'd say it still counts considering they wanna shove three more down our throats.

By that logic we should also all be talking about our dislike of critically praised movie Transformers, though.

That's not what I meant. Let's look at the two.

Crash was critically lauded and won an Oscar (undeserved), everyone loved it, and then, over time, it became more reviled than loved. Even still the Hollywood system wanted to find a way to get more bank out of it. They try a TV show and it fails. That can now be shoved to the wayside.

Avatar follows much of the same path, so it's still active.

That's how I see it anyway.

[Universal]

I siffed thru the thread a bit and I have a few useless opinions to add on movies people mentioned.

I will probably get shit for this but I don't get The Big Lebowski. Like, I enjoyed it the 3rd time I watched it but I still don't get the love it gets. I really enjoy the characters in the film but not enough to make up for such a dead-end story. I don't hate the movie by any stretch as that's a strong word, I just don't understand the love it gets.

Avatar is a movie that I don't understand the hate it gets. Seems like people hate it because it has a simple story that has been done before (in one way or another) and it was very successful. I'll take 10 Avatars over 3 (or 4, 5, 6 or however many they are making) Transformers movies any day of the week. Yes, the film is a mix of about 6 different stories (depending on who you ask). It borrows most of it's core elements from other stuff. I think the hate would be justified if it was at it's core, a bad film, but it's not, in my opinion. They didn't try to cheap out or simplify the story. They spent 3 hours building relationships and characters while introducing a very interesting world to the audience. All in the name of creating the first film that actually works with 3D in a way that enhances the environment instead of distracting from it.

Lord of the Rings feels like you are watching a novel on-screen, for the good and the bad. It's quite long for the story it's telling. I really liked The Lord of the Rings but I can't call myself a huge fan either. Very well done tho. Not sure how Peter Jackson could have done much better than he did with the material.

Honestly though, I can't think of one movie I disagreed with the critics enough to even call it a 'hate' for a film. Most of the films I really dislike are cult films that critics either panned or were mixed on. My disagreements are with movies, like The Big Lebowski, where I just didn't get the appeal or didn't think deserved such high of praise. Not that I outright hated.

Edited October 21, 2012 by Universal

[LUKIE]

I hated the LOTR movies.

[Noah]

The LOTR trilogy is good fun, but Return of the King in no way deserved all the

awards it got.

Wasn't it more that hollywood was rewarding the series as a whole, rather than ROTK itself?

I seem to remember talk about how they were going to wait until the last movie to honor the series, so to avoid 3 years worth of Oscars being dominated by the one franchise.

Edit:- all unofficial I mean.I'm not saying that this was an openly discussed plan but rather it was the rumor going around

[GoGo Yubari]

It's likely that that was partly their mentality, which is the same kind of bullshit that meant that Alan Arkin got a Best Supporting Actor award for a movie he was in for a brief period and was in no way a particularly great performance.

[C-MIL]

Looking on rottentomatoes to see what was actually critically praised...

Lord Of The Rings is really the only one that jumps out at me. I fell asleep during it. Multiple times...

Wasn't really crazy about Clerks either. Not a full-on hatred, but 88% is a head scratcher.

[OctoberRaven]

Only saw bits of Avatar, didn't care for it, but I didn't hate it. It just came off as the world's most expensive B-movie.

I guess Daybreakers could be seen the same way but the entire plot was just so incredibly stupid that for all intents and purposes the vampires shouldn't have been able to take over humanity in the first place because they just had no concept of foresight whatsoever.

[Sousa]

The Shining... yeah, I said it.

Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful movie, there are many iconic horror moments that are genuinely terrifying: the twins, the elevator, "here's Johnny," furries before furries were a thing... but Shelley Duvall is unbearable, it drags and it has nothing on the book in terms of being scary. I generally hate "the book was better" snobs, but yeah, the book was better.

Oh god, this.

Has anybody mentioned Chasing Amy yet? Jesus Christ, I wanted to kick that movie in its explicitly presented nards.