Ben Shapiro’s Most OVERRATED Films
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Just a few weeks ago, my Quasi-friend Matt Walsh had a whole list of movies he said were overrated. And frankly, he's wrong on nearly all of them. He made a video about how wrong he was on many of those picks. I mean, he said like The Dark Knight was overrated. It's just ridiculous. It's great by Batman movie standards, but it's not great as a piece of cinema. Now we're going to make a real list as to overrated films. So here's my standard for overrated. And Matt's standard makes no sense.

Matt's standard for overrated is like a movie is like an 8 out of 10, but people think it's a 10 out of 10. That's stupid. That's a bad standard, as I said in my video about Matt's dumb video. The actual standard for overrated is people think it's a 10 and it's a 0. It's the delta between what people think a movie is and what the movie actually is. I'm going to measure it by not only the critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, but also the audience score. Everyone has to be wrong in order for this thing to be truly overrated. Let us begin with the single most overrated film of all time, bar none, no question, The Shape of Water. If I told you about it,

What would I say? This came out in 2017 and it won Best Picture. And it's just sh**. It's the worst movie ever made. I'm not even joking about that. You went away and my heart went with you.

I'm not even a Guillermo del Toro hater. There are other Guillermo del Toro movies that I kind of like. For example, I can appreciate Pan's Labyrinth and Nightmare Alley. I was okay with that. But I'm just telling you, The Shape of Water, it's got a horrible script. Oh, you didn't like that, huh? I see. The performances are universally terrible. This candy, it's cheap candy, but I love it ever since I was a kid. Except for my friend Nick Searcy. Our universe will have a hole in it with your outline.

It makes no sense. It's politically ridiculous. The entire movie is about a woman f***ing a fish. It's just a collection of idiotic cliches. It's a deaf woman who can't get along with the rest of humanity, so she f***s a fish. And among her friends are a gay guy...

A black woman and a communist. And they are all under the thumb of the evil military industrial complex character, Michael Shannon, who is apparently impotent and has also got rotting fingers to symbolize his impotence. Again, predicated on the basic idea that conservatives are evil and everybody who sides against the conservatives

in a circle of the marginalized is good and also the lady should fish. That's it. Smaller, invisible, disfranchised characters that come together to save the ultimate other. I cannot express my hatred for this movie in strong enough terms. It's

It's just awful. It has a 92% Rotten Tomatoes rating from the critics and a 73% Rotten Tomatoes rating from audiences. Everyone who thinks this movie is good, y'all stupid. You stupid. Other massively overrated films. Avatar. The Avatar program is a bad joke. Which was at the time the single highest grossing movie in film history. Look at all that cheddar. Audience score 82% from Rotten Tomatoes, 81% critics score. Avatar is beautiful to look at and absolutely vacuous. It's one of these movies where everyone saw it and no one remembers it.

It is Alien Fern Gully. It's dances with wolves with blue aliens. I just pissed in my pants. It's the Kevin Costner character who takes the side of the natives against the evil, rapacious capitalists who are searching for, I kid you not, this is in the script,

Unobtainium. Unobtainium. I remember being signally offended by the fact that James Cameron thinks you are so stupid, apparently y'all are, that he could call a substance unobtainium. Unobtainium. Because, you get it? It's not obtainable. It's rare. It's unobtainium. Unobtainium. And apparently...

The U.S. military is some sort of rapacious blood-for-oil force on foreign planets. Their damn village happens to be resting on the richest unobtainium deposit. Somehow you've been able to cross galaxies, but the only way you can obtain the unobtainium is to tear down trees. I'd say diplomacy has failed. I don't understand why the military couldn't have just developed unobtainium fracking. Just drill sideways, my dude. It's not that hard. Trees!

I remember watching this with my wife in the theater, and we both burst out laughing at the end when the Sam Worthington character, who is now back in his normal body, is being cradled by the giant blue lady. And I was like, this is a very weird coupling. I see you. Don't look at me! More James Cameron on this list. Titanic. I'm the king of the world! James Cameron. Great with visuals, bad with plot. The best James Cameron film, by the way, by far, a truly great film, is Terminator 2. Terminator 2 is by far the best James Cameron film. There are no close competitors. But Titanic is a truly not good film. No!

It revolves around two of the most shallow, narcissistic, and ridiculous characters in the history of American film, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. You have a gift, Jack. You do. You see people. I see you.

Well, uh... They're just sort of pastiches. They're just pasteboard characters who are stuck on the Titanic. Like, if you actually wanted to make an interesting movie about the Titanic, you'd focus on some of the actual people who are on the Titanic without the kind of fake romance story. For example, there are people who legitimately let their spouses leave the Titanic and survive and instead decided to die in order so that they could save lives. Like, there's actual heroism on the Titanic. Speech! Speech!

And of course, this is not ripping on the visuals. Visuals are amazing. But the two biggest failures of a Titanic all happen in the last few minutes of the film. One, move over on the fucking door, lady. I know there have been full-scale physics studies that people have attempted to do as to whether it could have carried both their weight. I mean, at least give it a shot. Ah!

And if it doesn't work, climb back on. What's the problem? So he ends up dying. And then the single worst moment in any movie ever. So my mom, when she first watched Titanic, she literally picked up an object and threw it at the end of Titanic because the old stupid lady takes a priceless diamond and instead of bequeathing it to her heirs, you know, like the people who took care of her in her dotage, she throws it in the water. That makes no sense. She's a crazy, selfish old lady. And she was a crazy, selfish young lady. That really sucks, ladies.

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Other overrated films. The English Patient. I thought I would kill you. You can't kill me. I died years ago. It won nine Academy Awards in 1997, including Best Picture. And gotta tell you, it sucks. It's just terrible. The English Patient is nine million hours long. I'm still here. Just to suffer.

It revolves around characters who are entirely annoying. A French-Canadian, World War II, Royal Canadian Army medical. I have to remind myself of the plot because I just remember wanting to go comatose while watching this film. It is about this nurse who decides to settle in a bombed out monastery with her patient. And then it's this very, very long and non-plot filled story and euthanasia. So that's great. I honestly don't remember that much about this film. I just remember hating it, like dramatically hating it.

That year, what was up for Best Picture? The English patient, Fargo. A far better film, Jerry Maguire. A far better film, Sling Blade was made that year. What should have won, obviously, was a film that received no nominations, basically, which was the adaptation of Hamlet by Kenneth Branagh.

which is legitimately an amazing adaptation and maybe one of the great pieces of filmmaking ever made. To be or not to be. So the Academy went, nay on the Hamlet, yay on The English Patient, which no one has seen since.

Other radically overrated films. Get Out from Jordan Peele in 2017. 98% Rotten Tomatoes score. 86% audience score. Unlike some of these other movies, I don't think Get Out's like a zero. Shape of Water's a zero. Avatar is like a three. Titanic is like a three. The English Patient, zero. Get Out is like a four.

The metaphor is so obvious and also so obnoxious. They're probably abducting black people, brainwashing them, and making them slaves. I understand that people love the social satire, the commentary of Get Out, that black people and white people can never get along. Periskin has been in favor for the past, what, couple of hundreds of years? And that white people secretly want to turn black people into white people and take them to the sunken place? Now you're in the sunken place. I find that so insulting and ugly. I also just don't think it works very well in terms of a

a film. It's a horror film, but it was made out to be much more than a horror film. So again, I think this one's like a 4 out of 10, so it's better than these other films for sure, but the amount of just massive, massive approval that was poured on Get Out as a piece of social commentary I think is really dumb. And I understand there were some conservatives who were fine with it because it was really making fun of left-wingers, left-wing white people who were like, I voted for Obama, therefore I can't be a racist. I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could. Best president in my lifetime, hands down. I get it. I get the joke. But don't

But don't believe that Jordan Peele thinks that you, as a conservative white person, are any different. He thinks you're way worse than those people. Other movies that are on my list. And again, I have like an almost endless list of overrated films because I've seen so many films. So many. Black Swan.

85% critic approval rating, 84% audience rating. I get that there are some people who want to freeze frame some of the scenes between Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman, but let's get real about this. The movie sucks. The movie's just about a lady having a mental breakdown and then she commits suicide. Boom, done. What did you do? What did you do? I felt it.

What? And it's pretentious and it's obnoxious and it doesn't give you enough of a backstory for the ballerina for you to actually care about her. It's not even a good study of sort of perfectionism in art, which is I think what it's supposed to be. But that's because Darren Aronofsky is trash. Darren Aronofsky is the worst director of my lifetime. I hate Darren Aronofsky. I hate him with a passion of a thousand fiery suns. Terrible director. Awful in every possible way. Pretentious. Try mother. Incoherent. Try pie. Nonsensical. Arrogant. Ugly. Try Noah. The whale.

Okay, I understand it got a lot of acclaim because Brendan Fraser is fat and gay. But like, can we get over it? The Fountain makes no sense. Requiem for a Dream, overrated. I know there's some people who like The Wrestler. You're wrong. It's bad. Have you ever seen a dead dog flopping on down the road? Yes, I've seen a lot of bad Darren Aronofsky films. Okay, in my overrated films list. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Hi, Barbie. Barbie from Greta Gerwig. Of course, of course, of course. Watch me dance, dance the night away.

And if you want like a full hour-long take on why Barbie is a piece of sh**, go check out my YouTube video on it. 88% on Rotten Tomatoes, 83% from the audience. It makes no sense plot-wise. The minute that Barbie disappears from the scene, the men, who are supposedly subservient and terrible at everything, it turns out all the women like them when they're powerful and paternalistic and they take over society in literally one second flat. I like not having to make any decisions. It's like a spa day for my brain. Hey dudes, maybe we should be dudes. Hey, you know what? We like dudes. This is so much better than being

Honestly, the only thing anyone remembers is that Ryan Gosling is hilarious in the film. This is no longer Barbie's dream house. This shall henceforth be known as Ken's Mojo Dojo Casa House. Like, it's the only thing... Five years from now, ten years from now, nobody's gonna be like, God, you remember Margot Robbie? It's all Ryan Gosling, right? What did she say?

Okay, other overrated films. I mean, all of these are sort of heresy, but this one's really heresy. Fornication and heresy. I think Avengers Endgame is wildly overrated. No! God. Oh my God. 94% Rotten Tomatoes, 90% from the audience. The villain is not well-drawn in Avengers Endgame. Inevitable.

Listen, I appreciate the ambition of bringing together 20 movies or whatever it was. At the same time, it's so overstuffed and it's so tired and it's so long and the stakes are so low. And you know, if Disney Marvel get in trouble, they're just going to resurrect some of these characters. If they find themselves in a box canyon, which I think they will, Robert Downey Jr. will just come back as Iron Man. They'll just find a way to clone him or go to a different universe and get him.

I'm gonna need you to come with me. This is part of the problem with all of these movies. The whole multiverse thing. It's not great. Other major disappointments. Everything, everywhere, all at once. The whole multiverse thing. This movie had 94% Rotten Tomatoes score, 79% from the audience. It is repetitive. It is annoying. It is stupid.

It is repetitive. After the first 15 minutes, which is charming, it is repetitive. It's just a repetitive music video. It's like watching MTV in 2007. I understand that some people are into the visuals, but it's so ADD. It's just ADD filmmaking all the way through. Ah!

The underlying ethos of the film is ridiculous, which is that all pain can be traced to you being mean to your lesbian daughter or something. The pain of having you as my mother. Can we get over it? And I'm sorry, but like people walking around with hot dog fingers is not my idea of a great movie. Ah!

Okay, other overrated films on my list. Glass Onion, a Knives Out mystery. No! Hey, try to solve the murder mystery if you can. 91% from the critics, 92% from the audience. Y'all dumb. You stupid. So dumb. That movie is a cheat. The movie's a cheat. As I mentioned at the time, I understand, I don't understand. Okay, this take is perfectly good. I don't want to toot my own horn, but it's pretty next level.

If you're going to do a mystery movie, you have to give the audience enough clues that they could solve the mystery. That's how a mystery movie works. That way, when at the end of the movie you do the big reveal, you go, oh man, I should have thought of that all along. Now, the first knives out there actually did give enough clues that you could theoretically have figured it out given the fact pattern presented by the film. A donut hole in a donut's hole. In Glass Onion, Rian Johnson, who just sucks. I hate Rian Johnson. The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson.

Literally introduces a character halfway through the film that didn't exist for the first half of the film. My twin sister committed suicide. You come with me to that island as your sister. You could watch the first half of the film and it's made completely irrelevant by the introduction of the twin character halfway through. And that's the laziest twist ever. Twins is like a lazy, lazy. It's not even a good twin twist like you would have in, for example, The Prestige. Where again, all the clues are there, right? All the

Clues are in the prestige. They show you all the way through that there are two separate Christian Bales. You see his hands. You see him acting in two different ways. You have other characters saying, you don't seem like this other person. No, Alfred, stop. This isn't you. Here is... So dumb, it's brilliant. No! So bad.

Ugh. Ugh. All right. When's the murder mystery start? It's insulting. It's insulting. And the fact that it was treated as a clever mystery is an insult to the intellect. You want to make fun of these people and throw poop at them. Okay, finally, cult classic Napoleon Dynamite. Oh, my God. No, no. Rotten Tomatoes, 72%. Audience score, 74%. I hate this film. I hate it. I wish you'd get out of my life and shut up. It's stupid. It's annoying. It's not funny. It's not funny.

There are no jokes worth laughing at. You think anybody wants a roundhouse kick to the face while I'm wearing these bad boys? It's the kind of film I feel like Matt Walsh would like. Again, I can do an almost endless list of movies, I think, that are wildly overrated. But I think that that's plenty. And so now, I wish to issue my challenge to Matt Walsh. That's an actual great list of overrated films. It's way better than your shit list. So I want to hear your takes on why I'm wrong. And actually, some of these films are great. He's out.

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