Mean Streets for me. It was okay, but not great. Certainly not a classic.
Agree on The Big Chill
Agree on this too. I love the books. The movies, meh.
I’ll agree with everyone who said Avatar, but I’m not much for “spectacle” movies… like, where you have to ignore everything else about the movie because it’s less of a movie and more of an EXPERIENCE. My roommate at the time paid to see it in the theater three times and wouldn’t shut up about it. I could barely sit through it one time.
Is it sacrilege to say I’m not a fan of James Cameron in general? Titanic also left me… cold. 
A tip of the hat to you sir! I admire your sophisticated sense of humor.
First Man bored me throughout, action scenes included.
I heartily agree with both. I have never seen SBC before “Borat”, and I heard good things about his Ali G persona. Which I still have not seen, so I can’t say. Anyway, Borat turned out to be adolescent humor - sorry, I take back the word “humor” - and mostly just plain offensive without really being funny. The few good bits were countered by the the a film that just left me squirming in embarrassment. SBC’s actions to the villagers later make me wonder if he is funny, or just vicious. And he is supposed to be a well educated person?
A great many war flicks are pure dreck, but none more so than “Pearl Harbor”. We all know what’s going to happen, so we don’t need the irritating love interest, but then we find out that history got changed slightly. Why? What we are left with is the usual jingoistic nonsense.
I have not seen it, mainly because of the bad reviews, but I gather that “Enemy at the gates” is more or less fictitious, and ruined by the intruding live interest.
I suppose I ought to try and find “The green berets”, but it is probably unwatchable today. And in the unwatchable category: “Battlefield earth.” I expected a drawn-out Scientology tract; instead I got something so badly made and so ridiculous that I gave up after 15 minutes. What was bad? Plot, acting, direction makeup … not much left after that.
Haven’t seen it since it came out, but I’ll hazard a guess that it is now very dated.
A huge disappointment: Godfather 3. GF 2 was not as good as the first, GF 3 looked like a bad remake of GF 1 with the good parts missing. Contrived and unrealistic plot, and dreadful “acting” from Sophie Coppella.
Somebody mentioned “Mean streets”. I saw it on TV long after it came out, and found it good but not great.
“Lord of the rings”: I have read some of the books, and wondered how it could be translated to film. It’s a worthy attempt, but in so many ways it looks like a dozen other sword and sorcery epics that were ground out over the years. OK, the SFX could not have been done a decade earlier, but many other films just look similar. The battles also get very repetitive. And I haven’t seen “The hobbit”, which is probably overextended. It is really not a big book, and they made three films from it.
“Jurassic park” was another one I saw a few years after its initial appearance. Underwhelming. And why so many sequels?
Anything with Jim Carrey; you either love or loathe his manic style. I just think he acts like he is s bipolar (and I believe that actually he is).
Lost in Translation tops the list for me. Critics raved about it, but I found it borderline unwatchable.
Anchorman. I cringed through the first half of the movie and never did see the whole thing all the way through.
Most of the people I’ve known who saw that said the same thing.
Another critically acclaimed movie that underwhelmed me was a British film called “My Beautiful Launderette.” I was in a college literature class; we had to read the short story and the professor arranged a time and place for us to get together for a screening. Most of my classmates loved it; I didn’t think it was all that terrific.
Platoon
Napoleon Dynamite
any Jurassic park movie …….I liked the dinosaurs and the tidbits of humor but it wasn’t THE GREATEST MOVIE EVAH !!! like the world proclaimed …. no country for old men wasn’t horrible but wasn’t great …….
the big Lebowski fat old stoned hippie who bowls lives by hippie code … I have relatives like that ……
Interstellar was a letdown, mainly because of the potential that somehow slipped away.
Avatar, it was very good, however I seemed to miss the ‘it was great, one of the few greatest of all times’ feel of it. Yes i enjoyed it, but didn’t get that earthshaking wow others seemed to have.
Here’s another that I haven’t seen on this list yet, and was so underwhelming for me, I didn’t remember it until just now.
The following is not a typo; that movie is “Dirty Dancing.” I’m like, “THIS is what everyone’s raved about for the past 25 or so years?”
Ugh, I can’t stand Dirty Dancing. There are a lot of films in that subgenre that I don’t like, while still recognizing that they are well-made; I just don’t personally dig them. DD? Is not a good film. Completely linear plot, inaccurate period piece, crossing class lines is the Big Bad but no one seems to care about statutory rape…But I’m of the generation that wept, literally, over that film, so I’ve been obliged numerous times to either watch it or leave the room. Gah.
Blair Witch: I wonder how many people thought that movie was worth it, after they’d seen it and let it sink in. There was a sequel, so someone must have thought it had enough of a residual audience to justify spending more money. (Thought wrong, it appeared.) But does anyone remember that BW (the first one) came out the same month, or at least within weeks of, The Sixth Sense? Which ended up utterly stomping it re: box office, critics, and awards. TSS didn’t even get mentioned in Entertainment Weekly’s fall preview issue! Just goes to show how hard it is to predict what’s going to be a hit/have staying power.
Big Chill: For what it’s worth, according to the director’s commentary on the DVD, John Sayles does not think Lawrence Kasdan stole his idea. He addressed the issue several times, pointing out differences, such as the SS characters having these get-togethers every year, while the BC group was reunited by a funeral, and that BC was overall “a darker film”. His last word was, “I wrote my movie about my people, and Larry wrote his movie about his people, and they’re not the same.” If you don’t like BC, you just don’t, but Kasdan wrote Raiders, okay? He doesn’t have to steal from anyone. (And I also might point out that Sayles did not originate the unglamorous-people-doing-everyday-things style. There were plenty of films in the '70s, like Girlfriends, like Next Stop Greenwich Village, that were “non-Hollywood”.)
Easy Rider: Again, if you don’t like it, you don’t like it, but I think it’s not so much dated, as that it functions as a time capsule in a way that many turn-of-the-70s counterculture films don’t.
Amelie: Well, Quercus and amaguri, maybe I’ll give it another shot. But I’m not in a big hurry to do so. ::holds up demitasse spoon and smirks winsomely::
While I hate Blair Witch myself, It has to be given props for ist ingenious viral marketing campaign fitting very well with the (at that time) new “found footage” style. I vividly remember that there were loads of online discussions if or if not this was “real” found footage. It basically started a whole genre.
My underwhelming experience was “Bullit”, but that wasn’t the films fault either. It just doesn’t cut it as an action film 50 years later, however revolutionary it was during ist time.
And the fact that they completely changed the ending which burns my ass still today.
Titanic was awful. Horrible writing. The lines they spoke grated on my ears.
Bullitt isn’t really an action film. Its a police procedural with a few action sequences thrown in. Its also remarkable for filming almost everything on location. And the Lalo Schiffrin score.
Maybe - it’s just that it was always highlighted to me as basically inventing the modern car chase. And that was, well, not exactly adrenaline dripping action there. I don’t blame the film, it was ok - just not what I was expecting.
To this day, I’m mystified about how that movie gained a following.
Doesn’t matter, really: Kasdan had to be aware of S7, he set himself up for the comparisons, and he deserves to be on the losing end of them.
BC wasn’t so much a darker film, so much as that all the characters were a bunch of jerks. If a film is about the characters rather than a plot-driven film, and you can’t stand the characters, that doesn’t leave you with much.
Titanic; I was just there for the ship and the actual historical domain figures, couldn’t care less about Jack & Rose, or a stupid diamond.
Hurt Locker; angsty, very vaguely military.
Iron Man 3; convection apparently works differently in the MCU than it does in our universe. Took me right out of the movie.