8 Beloved Films That Didn’t Live Up to the Hype

Ever since we started dating, my boyfriend Steven and I have taken dozens of trips to the movie theaters to see releases new and old. And for the last three years, I have documented our favorite and least favorite films of each year. But with the pandemic shutting down movie theaters, we decided to focus our attention on beloved films with major cultural impact that we either always meant to get around to, or hadn’t seen in many years and had mostly forgotten.

From film noirs to 21st century blockbusters, we didn’t discriminate against any genres. The only qualification was that they had to be films of cultural significance. Some of them absolutely blew us away and lived up expectations, while others fell very short. And today I’ll be focusing on the ones that ultimately disappointed us. This isn’t to say that these films were the worst movies we watched all year, that they have no redeeming value or that there aren’t elements to them that we liked. The reason why they ended up on this list is because of how much they disappointed us, in relation to how much critics, the general public, and people we know hyped them up. I know I’m probably about to make a lot of enemies with a list like this, but I always aim for honest reviews, so here we go!

Warning: The Following List Includes Some Spoilers

Before we get into the list, here is a little bit about Steven and my taste in film and what will probably inform why we feel the way we do about the following films:

Steven's favorite films are the ones that move and influence the film industry. He loves Spielberg classics such as Jaws and Jurassic Park and the way they form what it means to be a blockbuster hit, and adores the complexity of The Shining and the excitement of the first two Godfather films. He's also a huge Star Wars buff (so you can imagine how painful this past few years has been for him) with an appreciation for fantasy and sci-fi.

My favorite films are the ones where you get to know the characters extremely well. I love films about relationships such as Titanic and Waitress, unforgettable musicals like The Sound of Music and West Side Story, and movies that give me hope like The Shawshank Redemption. Real people and real experiences interest me greatly, but I don't mind when a real life experience is embedded into fantasy and folklore…as long as it's fully fleshed out.

Inception (2010)

Inception is a movie that Steven and I had watched multiple times when it was first released 10 years ago. And since it had been many years since our last viewings, we decided to rewatch it with a new set of eyes. And things did not go as we’d hoped. Inception is the story of Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) who has mastered the art of Inception, a tactic where he’s able to enter people’s dreams and read their thoughts and ideas. He has been tasked to use Inception to plant an idea into someone’s mind, and throughout the process, his tragic life story unfolds. I remember watching this movie in the theater and feeling like it was so deep and complex, with an unforgettable ending. But years later, this Christopher Nolan blockbuster felt like a corny pretentious mess. And if you think that this change of heart must all be due to my maturing by 10 years, I doubt it, as we recently rewatched Nolan’s Batman movies, and still felt the same way about them: Batman Begins was still pretty good, The Dark Knight was still pretty good, and The Dark Knight Rises was still complete shlock. Plus there were plenty of people my current age raving about Inception in the theaters back in 2010. I personally chock this phenomenon up to a sign of the times.

It was so much more thoughtful than the other action movies of the time and therefore really resonated with its 2010 audience. And its immense success inspired tropes in not only action films and thrillers, but also even film scores and trailer editing. Inception is now infamous for its trailer, which features a score by Hans Zimmer and the blaring horn-like sound effect that continued to be used in action movie trailers for years to come. And so, with all of its influence, so much of what this film inspired ended up becoming cliche. After being bombarded with a decade’s worth of Inception-ized action movies, I now look at the film that started it all, and cringe. It’s not the film’s fault for being so popular. It’s just a movie I feel like you had to see at the time of release to really enjoy.

Moonstruck (1987)

I love romantic comedies, I love campy performances, and I love Cher. So how in the hell could I be so disappointed by 1987’s Moonstruck?

Moonstruck is centered around a romance that blooms between Loretta (Cher) and her new fiancé ’s younger brother Ronny (Nicholas Cage.) And when I heard that it earned six Academy Award nominations and three wins, including Best Actress for Cher and Best Original Screenplay, I stoked up images in my mind of a really complex film about a betrayal and lust. And for some reason, when I found out that Nicholas Cage of the Coppola clan was in it and that it centered around Italian-American culture, I thought I was about to watch something on par with The Godfather. But what I actually got was a culturally-infused romantic comedy - similar to My Big Fat Greek Wedding - filled with the over-the-top campy performances I should have anticipated by a movie starring the Dark Lady herself and Nick-not-the-bees-Cage. Come to think of it, I was silly to expect anything different. But all in all, I was highly disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong, this film is funny and charming, and I can totally see why people like it. But with how much it was hyped up as an Oscar-level picture by the critics, I felt like I didn’t at all get what I was “promised.” It was like being given a tomato for the first time with the notion that it’s a fruit, and judging it only based on how sweet it was. From here on out, I’m hoping that this movie can be advertised as the romcom that it is, so that it can be more fairly judged from the get-go. I plan to rewatch this film later on down the line once I’ve let go of the expectations I originally set for it. Here’s to hoping I snap out of it.

An American in Paris (1951)

Before we jump into my thoughts on An American in Paris, I want to talk about Cats. (The hit 1980s Broadway musical, not the abomination of a film by Tom Hooper staring T-Swizzle.) In my opinion, the biggest aspect that makes the musical Cats is so polarizing, is not the furry feline costumes, but the fact that it’s more of a revue than a coherent story. So if you want to see people in cat costumes perform really catchy songs with memorable choreography, you’ll be pleased. But if you are looking to follow a compelling narrative with character arcs, you will be disappointed. And the same goes for An American in Paris. If you are looking to watch a film with stunning sets/costumes and incredible choreography, you are going to love this film. But if like me, you wanted to follow a storyline and characters, this is not going to do it for you.

An American in Paris is about artist and ex-GI Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) who during his stay in Paris falls for a woman named Lise Bouvier (Leslie Caron.) He meets an heiress named Milo Roberts (Nina Foch,) whose interest in him romantically could spell fast success in the art world. As Jerry falls more and more in love with Lise, he asks her to leave her fiancé Henri to be with him. At the end of the film, she says no to him, leaves for five minutes, then suddenly returns saying that she’s changed her mind. Believe it or not, the plot I just described lasts almost two hours. How you may ask? Through the power of song and dance. Lots and lots of song and dance.

And make no mistake, I actually have a lot of positive things to say about this film. The dance numbers are memorable, the sets makes great use of trompe-l'œil and technicolor of the day, and both the intro with Lise dancing in the monochromatic rooms, as well as the last 15 minutes of this film are some of the most beautiful scenes I’ve ever witnessed. But as Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” And I think that this type of story would make more sense as a play than a movie. Because an extremely long dance number is more interesting when it’s being performed live in front of you, it can be kept ambiguous as to whether or not the fever dream-like scenes are actually taking place, and the lack of a plot can be forgiven because the experience is more like a trip to the ballet, than a trip to movie theater; therefore you could focus more on the skills of the performers, rather than whether or not the storyline makes sense. The fact that this movie is not based off of a book or a Broadway play, but instead an orchestral composition by George Gershwin makes it all the more clear why it has almost no semblance of a plot.

Again, this is another instance of me disappointed because for 28 years, people have told me that it’s one of the greatest movie musicals of all time, when really it’s moreso a movie that contains some of the greatest musical scenes of all time.

The Sixth Sense (1999)

Oh how I wish I could go back in time and watch this in the theaters in 1996 with absolutely no knowledge of the twist ending. I can guarantee that I’d have walked out of the double doors gushing about how much of a genius M. Night Shyamalan was. He basically brought the Citizen Kane-style twist ending to a new generation.

The Sixth Sense is the story of Dr. Malcolm Crowe - a child psychologist played by Bruce Willis - who is shot by one of his past patients, now all grown up. After recovering from the incident, Dr. Crowe gets back into his work, helping a disturbed young boy named Cole (Haley Joel Osment) who has the ability to see ghosts walking among the living. At the end, the audience makes the discovery that that Dr. Crowe was actually killed by his patient’s gunshot and the only reason why Cole can communicate with him is because he sees dead people. However, the fact that it’s one of the most commonly discussed film endings of all time, meant that throughout my viewing, I could see all of the cracks in the film’s plot very clearly, without reaping the benefit of the ending’s payoff.

How did he never realize that his wife didn’t say a word to him for months? Sure that scene in the restaurant where she says ‘Happy Anniversary’ was pretty clever if you don’t know how it’s going to end, but didn’t he think it was weird that she never set a place for him at the dinner table, never kissed him goodnight, and never asked him how work was going? Did he never go to the bank and realize the teller wouldn’t acknowledge him? Did he just never think twice about the fact that everyone at the grocery store always cut him in line? I get that Cole did say “[Ghosts] only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead." And if he was just in denial about being dead, I could totally accept that. But the film would have to explain the parameters of the world beyond the grave for it to all come together. Because of this, a movie like 1990’s Ghost (which does lay out the universe’s parameters of the spirits among the living) is much stronger from a storytelling aspect. But I will give The Sixth Sense some props for taking a bold chance back in the day.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)

If Fight Club posters are the stereotypical decoration of every male college student’s dorm room wall, a poster of Audrey Hepburn in the intro scene of Breakfast at Tiffany’s is the female equivalent. There is just something so picturesque about the idea of a woman dressed to the nines in a Hubert de Givenchy gown, standing outside of a New York City store window at 8 in the morning with a cup of coffee in one hand and a half-eaten croissant in the other. This image has helped to cement Audrey Hepburn as a pop culture icon in the minds of several generations, and I believe will continue to keep her legacy alive for many more. So with that fabulous introduction to her character and Audrey Hepburn being one of my favorite actresses of all time, I was shocked that this movie was so…blah.

The film is about an eccentric and evasive socialite named Holly Golightly (Hepburn), and her neighbor Paul (George Peppard) who fall in love, and throughout their relationship, peel back the layers of Holly’s sordid past. While this movie has a few cute memorable scenes, it is by no means her best performance, nor the best movie she was in. It wasn’t anything that Audrey herself or any of her cast-mates did. In fact, all of the performances were decent, her costumes are to die for, and the setting made for a really nice tour of 1960s New York City. But it was the story and characters by novelist Truman Capote that I couldn’t get behind. Her character of Holly is so selfish and glib with very little development taking place throughout the film, to the point where she is off-putting. Every decision she makes is only for her own benefit, regardless of whether or not it hurts others. And her decision to be with Paul at the end only takes place after she finds out that her wealthy fiancé is leaving her. And that’s just not the kind of character I feel excited to see have a happy ending. Maybe this is one of those stories that is more fleshed-out in book form, but it really makes for an underwhelming viewing experience. While that image of her in the Givenchy gown will never (and should never) go away, I really want future generations to stop assuming that this her best work. I don’t want Breakfast at Tiffany’s inadvertently reaping credit as a film, just because it features a timeless actress in a timeless dress.

V for Vendetta (2005)

I won’t lie - this one was a hard one to sit through. And I was really looking forward to seeing it after years of being told how great it is, and seeing how much the V mask has permeated the cultural zeitgeist. But all in all, this movie felt cheesy and dated, to the point where it detracted my focus from the story. V for Vendetta is an action film based on the 1980s graphic novel by the same name. It’s about a masked vigilante named V (Hugo Weaving,) who aims to take down London’s fascist government with the help of a woman named Evey (Natalie Portman.)

First of all, it’s hard to take seriously a social commentary-laced thriller when its tone is similar to the live-action 101 Dalmatians starring Glenn Close. Hugo Weaving’s portrayal of V definitely takes the film closer to the level of seriousness it’s attempting to achieve, but overall its editing and dialogue just screams late ‘90s/early 2000s cheese. Again, I wish I had watched this in the theater when it first was released, because this film is aging very poorly. But I really believe that it would have aged better had it been animated. I’m going to sound like a broken record, but the media is the message, and I feel like much of the imagery in this film (the angles it’s shot at as well as some of the melodramatic imagery) was shoehorned in for the sake of paying homage to the original graphic novel. When it comes to animation, things already don’t look realistic because they’re not real. So audiences can suspend their disbelief more easily. Then exaggerated imagery comes across as impactful in animation, where they can come across as melodramatic and cheesy when portrayed in live action. For example the image of V’s dead body surrounded by roses on the train, or the crowd of the people in Guy Fawkes masks would look so much more impactful in animated form. And there are other elements I feel are meant to be read in a graphic novel rather than heard aloud, like all of the V alliterations made when V and Evey first meet. But I am guessing that this movie would have had more of a niche status had it been animated. I definitely think there is potential here to make a good animated version in the future if the right people worked on it. Only time will tell.

Also some of the lines they give Natalie Portman to read give me Nam-style flashbacks to Revenge of the Sith. But we’ll save that can of worms for another time.

E.T the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

Back in the ‘90s when I was little, I distinctly remember attempting to watch E.T. The Extra Terrestrial on TV, and my parents turning it off after Elliott called his brother “Penis Breath” in the first 10 minutes. Sadly, I waited until I was 27 to finally view it, and the “goodness” of this film from a storytelling aspect felt very overblown. And I was really looking forward to finally seeing this children’s sci-fi classic. It was directed by Steven Spielberg, scored by John Williams, and featured masterful puppetry (which I always love) as well as noteworthy child performances by Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore. What could I possibly find to fault?

Initially, it was hard for me to pinpoint what I found wrong with E.T. Most of the criticisms I have of the movie are nitpicks. Such as the whole plot about the mom being a struggling single mother in an enormous professionally decorated home filled with designer furniture. And the scene where E.T. lets the frogs escape biology class has a bizarre surreal tone that feels disjointed from the rest of the movie, where it’s never explained why a kid crawls across the floor to lie underneath Elliott so that he can be taller than his crush when he plants a big smooch on her. And the scene where astronauts in full EMU garb show up to Elliott’s home and walk towards his family in slow motion like a bunch of floating zombies made me check to see if someone had put hallucinogens in my takeout order. Not to mention the film is just packed with distractingly obvious product placement from the Reese’s Pieces, to the branded boardgames in Elliotts room, to the countless pieces of Star Wars merchandise (yes it’s not lost on me that Spielberg is close friends with George Lucas. Trust me: My boyfriend Steven has told me all about it.)

“But Sydney,” I’m sure you’re thinking to yourself. “Blatant product placement, unrealistically expensive home decor, scientific inaccuracies and strange shifts in tone occur all the time in film. Why are they so distracting to you when watching E.T. in particular?” And I think that has to do with the rest of the film being so simplistic, that I’m not engaged enough to ignore all of the bizarre mistakes and/or creative liberties mentioned earlier. It really is a cut and dry film for children, and not much else. It’s funny and cutesy, it’s filled with cool toys and electronics and bicycles with which kids could fill their letters to Santa, and -most importantly - it covers the checklist of all all the things a kid would like to do if they had a pet alien: Scare their kid sister, pull a fast one on their mother, play dress up, have the alien make their school day more fun… It’s no wonder why this movie stuck in the minds of all of the kids who watched it way back when. At the end of the day, the movie is trying to tap into the mind of a child, not the mind someone in their late 20s trying to outline the film’s rhetoric.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is still enjoyable as an adult. Toy Story is still enjoyable as an adult. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is still enjoyable as an adult. But when it comes to E.T, it’s probably best to watch it as a kid, or with a kid to really get something out of it. Because once you stop trying to make sense of the universe and the story itself, there are a lot of iconic visuals and cute lines to enjoy.

Almost Famous (2000)

Out of all of the films in this list, this is the one about which I have the fewest good things to say. Almost Famous is the story of a 15-year-old named William (Patrick Fugit) who is assigned by Rolling Stone to interview an up-and-coming band. He ends up befriending the band members as well as their glorified groupies, and joins them on their tour. And that’s pretty much it. To this movie’s credit, it was twee before twee was twee. It truly felt like it was made in 2009 and I was blown away by how ahead of its time it was. But after my viewing, I had no idea how this garnered so much praise at the time, and why it is still regarded as a high-ranking film. The dialogue sounds like it was written by a freshman in a creative writing class (acting like everything said and done is just so profound and whimsical,) it’s not a compelling or unique story about the music industry, and it’s criminally boring and long-winded. This movie is a mind-numbing 2 hours and 42 minutes. To give you some perspective, the original Godfather was 2 hours and 58 minutes long. Which means Almost Famous felt that it had just 16 minutes less of things to say than The Godfather. All so that this little kid could follow a bunch of jerks and their teenage girlfriends around before ultimately failing to fulfill his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to write for one of the biggest music publications of all time.

And while we’re on the subject of their teenage girlfriends, is Kate Hudson’s Penny Lane the first modern Manic Pixie Dreamgirl? I know that there are some OG’s in classic film such as Audrey Hepburn, but I feel like this was a really early blatant use of the trope. And for a rated R movie that hints that these grown men are sleeping with these underage girls/that this 15-year-old boy is going to be pressured into having a 5-way, you’d think that it’d be a little bit grittier. To maybe drive home how disturbing it is that this kind of thing is so common in the entertainment industry. But no, this movie gives hard-hitting topics such as pedophilia and rape the same whimsical treatment a movie like that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close gave the events of 9/11.

But notice once again, I am comparing this movie to one that was released a decade later. And I think that this is where we unlock the reason why this film has garnered so much acclaim. It’s not the character development or the story, and it sure as hell isn’t the dialogue. It’s the fact that it was way ahead of its time, and people hadn’t yet seen anything in this indie twee tone that became more common five or six years later. In fact, I think this movie was probably very influential to that brand of film. And if you’ve never seen anything quite like this, it’s probably a very memorable viewing experience. Just because later movies would go on to do this brand of twee storytelling much more successfully (think Juno or Little Miss Sunshine,) that doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t give some credit to this movie for originality. But that also doesn’t mean I have to say it’s good.

What Did I Learn From These Films?

There was a clear trend that I noticed when going through these beloved films this past year: Originality and breaking ground gives a lot of weight to the credibility and legacy of a film in the public eye.

I think back to movies that I really liked when they first hit the theaters, but got worse and worse to me as the years went by such as Inception, Birdman, and Her. It’s not that I was “wrong” then when I enjoyed them upon first viewing, or that I’m “wrong” now looking back in hindsight. Film is art, so it’s naturally subjective. And I was at a different place and time during my first viewing vs now. For example, breakup movies hit harder when you’ve just had your heart broken. Movies that explore themes important to people in 2009 may not be as relevant to people who are focused on the hard-hitting issues of 2019. And we as people grow and change with the passage of time or major events. It’s actually really incredible to think that some movies are so impactful to us that we love them the rest of our lives.

But these films taught me to not automatically give a movie a lot of credit just because other people say they like it. To stick to facts such as “At the time this movie was highly regarded by critics/audiences,” rather than assumptions like “so that means that it must have great acting/a great story/great effects.” And to go into every movie with an open mind, taking them at face-value rather than comparing them to what I felt I was promised by self-proclaimed film experts or the public.

Until we meet again!